Yes to the Dress
by Qoheleth
Summary: Because, crazy as it sounds, I really believe that the outcome of "Civil War" would have been both happier and more logical if they'd given Wanda her proper costume. AU.
1. The New Look

_**PARIS**_

"That one might work for you," Natasha Romanoff commented, pointing to one of the images in the Gustave Perrault stock catalogue. "On the left, number 225 – _La Déesse du Mer_."

Wanda Maximoff studied it critically, and then shook her head. "No, I don't think so," she said. "It's pretty, but I don't think it's my color."

Natasha gave her a wry look. "So you're still holding out for something in red?"

"What's wrong with that?" Wanda demanded. "I'm entitled to have a favorite color, just like everyone else. There's nothing wrong with red, is there, Captain?" she said, turning to shoot an appealing glance at the bench behind her.

Steve Rogers glanced up from Paul Johnson's _Modern Times_ , and blinked vacantly for a moment before processing the question. "Um… no," he said. "No, there's nothing wrong with red. Not as a color, anyway; if we're talking the other kind of Red, then maybe…"

"I am not a Communist," said Wanda stiffly.

"Okay, then."

"I'm not even an Înaintată."

This was a new one on Steve. "A what?"

"It's the main Sokovian left-wing party," Natasha said. "Mild by the standards of most EU states, but still regarded with suspicion by the country's traditionalists."

"They want to destroy the heritage of Europe for the sake of peace and quiet," said Wanda, her nose now back in the stock catalogue.

Natasha gestured expressively. "You see what I mean."

"Mm," said Steve. "Well, I wouldn't know about that. My folks were FDR Democrats; as near as I can tell, that basically means I don't have a political party anymore."

Natasha cocked her head. "Oh?" she said. "Then what are you doing reading neoconservative agitprop like Paul Johnson?"

Steve shrugged. "Sam recommended it," he said. "Said it would give me a better idea of what happened in the '60s than anything I was likely to hear on NPR. And his taste is generally pretty good, so I thought I might as well give it a shot." He tactfully didn't mention the other and decisive factor in his bringing it along, which was its 880-page length in the revised edition – just right, he had thought, for accompanying two women to a Paris boutique.

It was a strange situation all around. He and Rhodey had been engaged in a delicate waltz of breakfast preparation the preceding morning when Natasha had walked in, and, apropos of nothing, had announced that, now that Wanda was out of mourning, she was taking her dress-shopping for her (Wanda's) psychological health. In response to the two men's quizzical glances, she had pointed out that Wanda had been experimented on by a mad scientist and manipulated by a genocidal robot, the latter of whom had killed her twin brother and tried to use her home city as a WMD, and that she was now living as a foreign refugee under the protection of the man who had built said robot (and the weapons that had killed her parents); if Steve and Rhodey didn't think she needed a little confidence boost after all that, Natasha put it to them that they hadn't been paying attention. And there was, she maintained, no better way for a young woman to recover a sense of her unique personal worth than by spending a few hours trying on pretty clothes. She spoke, she said, from personal experience: after escaping from the Red Room, almost her first act had been to find a Moscow couturier and buy herself a dark-blue dress with fish-netting across the shoulders. ("I still have it around somewhere," she added, causing Rhodey to perk up with sudden interest.) So, if anyone wanted to know where the two of them were, Steve and Rhodey were to say that they'd taken the quinjet to Paris for an afternoon's pleasant stimulation of the French economy. And, with that, she had cheerfully swept past them and started cutting herself a grapefruit.

Before the two Eastern belles had managed to get out the door, though, Tony had somehow gotten wind of their plans, and had come down to announce in no uncertain terms that they wouldn't be cruising the Triangle d'Or on _his_ dime. If Wanda needed pampering, Natasha could buy her an ice-cream cone; he'd had enough of haute-couture shopping sprees when Pepper had used her appointment as Stark Enterprises CEO as an excuse to buy some $600 worth of shoes – none of which, he wished to note, he had ever subsequently observed her wearing. It might have been one thing if the _soldes_ had been going on, but that was still a month away…

What erupted at about that point was perhaps the closest thing to a civil war that the Avengers had yet seen. Steve hadn't even known that there _were_ that many different ways to condemn the arrogant insensitivity of men in general and Tony Stark in particular, let alone that Natasha could say them all without pausing for breath. And Tony (never one to let himself be bested in a war of words) had waited calmly for her to finish, and then started systematically turning each epithet inside out as only he could – his general thesis apparently being that arrogant male insensitivity was what had made America great, and that Wanda was darn lucky he wasn't making her go naked, the way Andrew Carnegie would have done. (Or something like that. The historical details of the argument were a little vague, here and there.)

To Steve, all this sounded like little more than the eternal struggle between vanity and stinginess, and he probably wouldn't have bothered to get involved – except that he happened, as Tony and Natasha squabbled, to glance in Wanda's direction as she sat awaiting the final verdict, and the expression on her face cut him to the quick. She didn't seem upset, or angry, or even sad in the usual sense; it was more a look of wistful resignation, as though she were saying to herself, _Well, it was pleasant to imagine that this nice thing might happen to me, but of course I shouldn't really have gotten my hopes up._ It was the look of someone who had yielded herself as a punching bag to destiny – and all the Captain America in Steve Rogers rose up in determination to erase it.

So he had interrupted Tony in mid-sophistry, and volunteered to go with Natasha and Wanda himself and make sure that they didn't spend more than was reasonable. And so, three hours later (or nine, if you took the time difference into account), here he was, in the most exclusive and avant-garde clothier's outlet on the Avenue Montaigne, surrounded by ornate headpieces and form-fitting bodysuits in every color of the rainbow, and consoling himself with the thought that, after all, the cutting edge of fashion in his own day would probably have looked just as absurd to someone from 1870. And, anyway, it was Wanda's pursuit of happiness that he was upholding, not his own.

Then, as he was returning his attention to _Modern Times_ , he heard a polite cough behind him, and glanced up to see M. Perrault himself standing at his shoulder. "Your pardon, Monsieur le Capitaine," the costumier said with a little bow, "but it is not always that so great a champion of liberty finds himself at my humble establishment. My son is an admirer of the most tremendous kind of _les héros avengeurs_ , and I should surely suffer in his estimation should I fail to… ah… well, in a word, Monsieur, if it should please you to create for him a small souvenir of this occasion?" And he withdrew a pen and a slip of paper from his pocket, and held it out with a significant gesture.

Steve grinned. "Sure, I'd be glad to, Mr. Perrault," he said. "What's your son's name?"

Perrault told him, and Steve took the paper and pen and wrote, carefully, " _Du Capitaine Amérique, à son ami Théodore._ " As he did so, he remembered with amusement a remark Tony had made a few hours before, about how Captain America going to France was like Oilman among the Water Babies. Steve, thinking of Lafayette and the Statue of Liberty, had thought it a strange comment even at the time, but it had nonetheless caused him to enter the City of Lights a little more nervously than he might otherwise have done, just in case something really had happened since 1943 to justify the assessment. It was a relief to find that it was, after all, just Tony being Tony.

"The ladies are Avengers, too, you know," he added as he handed back the pen and paper, gesturing to the bench where Wanda was still flipping through catalogue images, Natasha standing loyally at her side. "You'll probably want to throw in their autographs, just to be on the safe side."

Perrault frowned, and squinted at the two superheroines. "Ah," he said. "Well, of course I recognize _La Veuve Noire_ , but who is the young brunette? I was unaware of any second woman in your phalanx."

"She's new," said Steve. "She joined us during that little mess in Sokovia last month, and she's still kind of finding her feet. That's why we're here, actually."

Perrault nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, I see," he said. "Well, perhaps shortly, then. You comprehend, it never pleases one to interrupt the customers while they are…"

At this moment, Wanda's head jerked upward, and a dazzled gleam came into her eyes. "Ooh, now _this_ is nice," she said.

In an instant, Perrault was at her side, his gaze following her pointing finger. "Ah, yes, Mademoiselle," he said approvingly. " _L'Enchanteuse Écarlate_ – a brand-new line, less than a month old, the work of one of our most promising young designers. A most suitable choice, if I may say."

"Expensive, too, I'll bet," said Natasha wryly.

Perrault waved his hand dismissively. " _Un peu,_ " he conceded. "But for so lovely a young lady, surely no expense is to be spared."

"Do you have it in a 38?" said Wanda eagerly.

"But of course," said Perrault with a smile, and whistled to a passing saleswoman. " _Yvonne! Vas chercher une Enchanteuse Écarlate, à la taille trente-huit, et escortes cette demoiselle aux salles d'essayage._ "

" _Oui, M'sieu Perrault,_ " Yvonne replied. " _Venez, Mam'selle._ "

* * *

After Wanda had left for the fitting room, Perrault, naturally enough, turned his attentions to Natasha, and it wasn't long before her good wishes to Théodore were resting, in her rather crabbed copperplate, just below Steve's. This done, the proprietor bowed and withdrew, and Natasha pulled up what was probably meant to be a chair and seated herself familiarly next to Steve. "What do you want to bet he doesn't have a son at all?" she whispered conspiratorially.

Steve, who had successfully re-immersed himself in _Modern Times_ , was a little nonplussed at this sudden recall to the present. "Who?" he said.

"The manager," said Natasha. "Five will get you ten he just made up little Théodore to save face, and he really wanted our autographs for himself."

Steve considered this for a moment, and then shook his head. "No, I don't think so," he said. "If he had, he'd have found some way of keeping me from making the note out to him. I mean, that'd be pretty hard to explain when he showed it off, wouldn't it?"

"He probably doesn't intend to show it off," Natasha retorted. "He'll just keep it in a filing cabinet in his villa in the Trocadéro, and take it out late at night to gloat over when no-one's around. You've got to think like one of these autograph hounds, Steve."

"Well, maybe," said Steve vaguely. He still wasn't quite persuaded, but his mind was on other things; the image of an avant-garde Parisian fashion designer gloating over Captain America's autograph had brought Tony's Oilman comment back to his mind with peculiar force, and he thought that now was as good a time as any to get it decoded.

"Say, Nat," he said. "What did Tony mean, back at the Facility, when he said that thing about America and France? Did something happen while I was in the ice to get us on the bad side of the people here?"

Natasha arched an eyebrow. "You mean Paul Johnson hasn't told you about the Suez Crisis?" she said. "So much for that 'hits all the highlights' blurb on the back."

"I haven't gotten that far yet," said Steve impatiently. "I'm still in chapter 2; Lenin hasn't even consolidated his power in Russia yet. I was taught not to skip ahead in books, and I don't."

"Mm," said Natasha. "Well, then, lend an ear, Rip Van Winkle, and hear the chronicles of days gone by. You know about the Suez Canal, I assume?"

"Sure," said Steve. "It's what ships in the Mediterranean sail through when they want to get to the Indian Ocean."

"Or the Persian Gulf," Natasha added. "Right. Well, in 1956 the president of Egypt unilaterally seized control of the Canal from the treaty corporation that was legally responsible for it. That made the French and the British very unhappy, and they teamed up with the Israelis to take it back. And they would have succeeded, except that the U.S., after the initial Israeli attack, denounced them to the United Nations and threatened to destroy the value of the British pound if they didn't lay off."

Steve winced. "Ouch," he said. "Stabbed in the back by one of their own."

"And humiliated by her in front of the whole world," Natasha added. "France has never forgotten it, and her response to every U.S. initiative since, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, has been colored by that bitterness."

"Hard to blame her," Steve admitted. "But, if it was the pound we targeted, why isn't England bitter toward us the same way?"

"She was, for a while," said Natasha. "But the French have always been more sensitive about their honor than the British – and, besides, the Suez failure hit France at a moment when she was especially vulnerable. Britain had already lost the core of her empire by '56, and her days as a great power were obviously numbered; Suez was more a last hurrah for her than anything else. But France was still struggling to retain a number of her major colonies – particularly, as it happened, on that very shore of the…"

But then her eyes were drawn to something over Steve's right-hand shoulder; she let her voice trail off and her mouth hang open for a moment, and, when she spoke again, it was in a tone a thousand miles removed from historical analysis. "Well, well," she murmured. "Looks like there really was a Sokovian mountain rose inside our little refugee."

Steve craned his neck to follow her gaze, and then rose automatically to his feet. It was a habit he'd gotten a bit of flack for, over the years, but he steadfastly maintained that it was the appropriate way to respond to the arrival of a lady – and the vision in crimson who was currently approaching, flanked by a broadly smiling Yvonne, certainly fell into that category. He knew, intellectually, that it was Wanda, but the transfiguration that had been effected in those few minutes was so total that he had difficulty bringing that knowledge home to his senses.

For some odd reason, the first detail that caught his attention was the gloves. Maybe it was just nostalgia; long gloves had been a standard part of women's evening regalia during his formative years, and it had always disappointed him a little that that fashion hadn't survived into the 21st Century. Anyway, Gustave Perrault – or his "promising young designer" – seemed to be making a manful effort to bring it back; from fingertip almost to shoulder, Wanda's arms were sheathed in a lustrous red material that gleamed with soft resplendence in the shop's full-spectrum lighting. The same material swathed her torso and midriff, in a form that Steve couldn't decide whether to classify as the ultimate in mini-dresses or an unusually formal leotard; below and above this, apart from the spaghetti straps that held it in place, her flesh was covered only by some sort of fine pink gauze – or maybe it was bare, and the faint carnation tinge was merely a trick of the reflected light. A curiously shaped headdress, almost like a pair of crimson cat's ears or alate flower petals, framed her face, while her feet (perhaps in a half-hearted nod to practicality) were enclosed in a pair of short, flat-heeled boots. And draped behind her, crowning the whole effect, was a gossamer cape of pale magenta, which would have reached all the way to her calves if the end of it hadn't danced and billowed gently with each step she took. The whole thing, in short, was about as far removed from the leather jacket and generic little black dress that she had arrived in as could readily be imagined.

But the real transfiguration wasn't a matter of Wanda's clothes, but of her whole spirit. For as long as Steve had known her (which, admittedly, hadn't been long), Wanda Maximoff had projected an unmistakable air of little-girl-lost; despite the formidability of her power, she had reminded him of some frail leaf blown helter-skelter on the wind, tossed haphazardly from evil to good without ever truly finding an identity and a place to stand. But now, somehow, it was as though she had caught a glimpse of the woman she was meant to be – as though the mere fact of having donned a scarlet cape and headdress had made her truly believe in the Avenger that Clint had told her she was. Before, it had been as though his word was all she was going on; now, anyone who passed her on the street could have seen that she, herself, thought she was a superheroine. (Steve wondered if that was how ordinary soldiers felt, when they first got into their uniforms. He hadn't, himself, but those circumstances had been somewhat exceptional.) Somewhere in the back of his mind, an old Sunday-school memory stirred: _He was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood… in righteousness he doth judge and make war._

 _Score one for Natasha,_ he thought. _She wanted to boost Wanda's confidence, and, by golly, she did. For our enemies' sakes, I hope they're prepared; there's a new Avenger on the block, and she's ready for action._

And on the heels of that thought came another: _Better secure our friendship while I can. If the Avengers ever turn on each other, I want this kid on my side._

* * *

Wanda, seeming to feel the admiring gazes of her friends, turned to them and beamed with radiant delight. "Well, what do you think?" she said, wriggling her shoulders as she spoke to swirl her cape about a little extra.

"I think you clean up very nicely, Wanda," said Natasha with a smile.

Steve nodded. "Yeah, that's a good look, all right," he said. "A little on the revealing side, maybe, but…"

Yvonne giggled. "M'sieu, you did not see the first sketches," she said. "I vow to you, this is nothing."

Steve had a brief flash of curiosity, and then decided it was better that he didn't know. "I'll take your word for it," he said. "So you're ready to check out, Wanda?"

The look in her eyes was all the answer he needed. "Okay, then," he said. "What did you folks call this thing? 'Scarlet Witch'?"

" _L'Enchanteuse Écarlate_ ," said Yvonne primly.

"Right," said Steve. "We'll take one of those. Don't bother wrapping it up; I think Miss Maximoff will prefer to wear it on her way out."

"Definitely," Wanda grinned.

"Wait a minute," said Natasha suddenly. "What are the cleaning requirements for this? If she's wearing it when an alien's head explodes next to her, can she just toss it in the washing machine to get the stain out?"

Yvonne pursed her lips. "Oh, no, Madame," she said. "This is a fabric of the most delicate; at no time must it be treated so. A dry clean, it is the only way."

Natasha frowned. "Well, that could be a problem," she said. "If there's one thing I've learned with the Avengers, it's that crises don't thoughtfully space themselves out between laundromat trips."

Wanda shot her a look of sudden alarm, as of one told that her miraculous healing was invalid under subsection C. "Well… there are ways around that, aren't there?" she said. "We could… have it treated somehow, or install a unit in the Facility, or… or…"

"Or we could buy several costumes instead of just one," Steve remarked, "so that you always had a replacement on your laundry day."

The three women all turned to him in surprise. "Could we?" said Wanda, her eyes glowing with unmixed delight. (Yvonne's expression was similar; either she was deeply devoted to her employer's interests, or she was working on commission.)

"Sure," said Steve. "Why not?"

Natasha gave him a thoughtful look. "Steve, you old rascal," she said. "And here I thought you were supposed to be our fiscal conscience."

"I said I'd make sure you didn't spend more than was reasonable," said Steve. "It's always reasonable to get backups of the things you really need."

A slow smile spread over Natasha's face. "Steve Rogers, you are a man in a thousand," she said. "All right, Yvonne. I'm sure your employer knows the address of our Facility – or at least his son does," she added in a conspicuously bland tone. "Tell him to wrap up six more of these _Enchanteuses_ , to send them to us by the quickest and most secure international shipping available, and to charge the whole bill to Mr. Tony Stark."

" _Oui, Madame,_ " said Yvonne, grinning.

* * *

 _And so the thing was done. Its consequences, though, were just beginning – for none of our heroes, as they exited the Perrault boutique that late-spring morning, perceived the fateful events that nearly awaited them, or how these would be diverted and reshaped by their actions of that day. Which reshapings will be narrated, for those who choose to hear, in the second part of_ **Yes to the Dress** _._

* * *

 **Disclaimer:** The story elements are by Marvel Studios out of Marvel Comics; the cover image is by Looper out of Photoshop. (Indeed, the story largely owes its existence to that one picture - albeit, as a founding member of Disgusted with 21st-Century Comics Amalgamated, I designed the actual _Enchanteuse Écarlate_ on rather more classic lines.) _Modern Times_ is a product of HarperCollins Publishers; a new hardcover copy sells for $28.83 on Amazon, while used copies start at $12. (I log-roll out of gratitude; at least three of my other stories are derived from HarperCollins material.)


	2. Quick Change

**Author's note:** As this chapter begins the CW-critique aspect of the story, I suppose I should establish some ground rules. Simply put, since this story is an attempt to rationalize _Civil War_ , I do not regard it as bound by anything established in movies subsequent to that one. (With one exception, which is implicitly indicated in chapter 10, and will be explicitly established somewhat later.) Be prepared, therefore, for such things as the sex of the Ancient One, the status of Thor's relationship with Jane, the identity of M.J., the culture and history of Wakanda, the location of the Soul Stone, and the life story of Carol Danvers to be dramatically different from what Disney gave us - not that all of those things _will_ be explicitly changed, but that any of them _might_ be. But this is a matter for subsequent chapters to worry about; for now, let's just enjoy our visit to…

* * *

 _ **LAGOS**_

When Natasha arrived at the Hotel Bashe and saw the plumes of smoke coming out of its eastern wall, the first sentence out of her mouth consisted of a single Russian word unfit for public consumption. The second was, "Can't I _ever_ leave the rest of you unattended?"

Steve, distracted with calling for fire-and-rescue support (and, Natasha suspected from his bearing, with something else as well), didn't respond. Wanda, however, as she stared upward in a horrified daze, managed to whisper, "I'm sorry, Nat."

 _Well, I should hope so,_ Natasha thought bitterly. _I'd hate to think what would have to have been going on in that building, for you_ not _to be sorry about doing this to it._

"That's not going to cut it," she said. "What happened?"

Wanda shook her head helplessly. "I don't know," she said. "I thought it was all right, but there must have been some sort of tiny updraft outside the hex zone – just enough to weight the probability skew in favor of ascent. And then inertia took over, and…" She trailed off, and her lower lip started to tremble violently.

It was at moments like these that Natasha was perversely glad to have had her maternal impulses severed. A whole woman might have wasted precious seconds trying to console her young colleague; the Black Widow, by contrast, was able to turn her back on the girl entirely, and address herself to the challenge of persuading Captain America to commit an act of realism.

"Steve, we need to bail," she said. "The police will be here any minute, and we are in no position to give them a decent explanation."

Steve frowned. "I don't like to run from the police," he said.

But his tone was uncharacteristically hesitant, and Natasha knew she had been right about him having something else on his mind. Ruthlessly, she pressed her advantage. "Steve, we're not talking about your idealistic American police," she said. "This is the Third World; a non-corrupt legal system is something they've heard about here, not something they've ever seen. If you want Wanda to have a fair shot under an equal law, we need to head back to the quinjet, get back onto American soil, and then arrange for a settlement at the Hague with…"

"No."

Natasha blinked; it was what she had been afraid Steve might say, but his lips hadn't moved, and the voice had been too high-pitched and Romanian-accented to be his. She turned, and saw Wanda looking at her with eyes that, though still moist with pity and anguish, were none the less fierily determined for all that.

"I won't run, Nat," she said.

Natasha groaned in spirit. "Wanda, this is no time for quixotism," she said. "Remember what Thor told you and Pietro, about prudence and fortitude? This is a case for prudence."

"What Thor told us," said Wanda, her gaze drifting toward Steve as she spoke, "was that a warrior has to combine four things: prudence, fortitude, temperance… and justice. _Combine_ them, Nat, not pick and choose." She folded her arms across her chest. "I won't run."

And Natasha knew she wouldn't. A year before, she would have, but something about Wanda Maximoff had changed over the winter; it was as though she had willed a core of strength into her heart, and the childish vapidity that had once characterized her had, by and large, evaporated into nothingness. Sam had remarked on that, in fact, while they were actually on their way to Lagos – and Wanda had just shrugged and replied, "I'm trying to live up to my reflection."

At the time, Natasha had been quite proud; now, the thought made her silently curse headlines around the world – "Avenger Held on Manslaughter Charges" – a black eye from which their little band might never recover – all because she'd gone and bought Wanda that stupid costume. What had she been thinking?

Well, there was no undoing it now. She could see from the look in Steve's eyes that his moment of weakness had passed; Wanda's bravado had re-awakened his own sense of republican integrity, and there was no longer any question of persuading him to evade the social contract. With a sigh, the realist in her surrendered to the brute fact of idealism.

"Okay, fine," she said. "I just hope you know what you're in for. The next few hours aren't going to be easy."

* * *

"Well," said Sam a few hours later, as they soared over the Atlantic toward home. "That was easy."

Natasha, still somewhat dazed, didn't reply. The four of them had stood beneath the smoldering hotel, waiting for the police to arrive, for over two hours, the monotony broken only by the comings and goings of the rescue teams and occasional outbursts of distraught rage from friends and relatives of the dead and wounded. (One woman had pounded her fists on an unresisting Steve's chest for three minutes before finally collapsing into tears at his feet; later on, a man with a leopard tattoo on his cheek had leaped from the crowd and knocked Wanda to the ground with a loud cry, and might well have pummeled her into unconsciousness if Sam hadn't grabbed him by the collar and challenged him to pick on an Avenger his own size.) And, after a while, even that had tapered off, and it had been just the four of them hanging out aimlessly by the corner, like an unusually mature and clean-cut street gang – complete, in Natasha's case, with leather jacket and concealed weaponry.

Then, while she was suppressing a mischievous impulse to lean against the wall and start snapping her fingers in six-eight time, an unmarked black Range Rover had pulled up across the street, and a nondescript man of about forty, in civilian garb, had gotten out, crossed over to where they stood, and displayed his credentials as a high-ranking official of the Lagos State Police Command. Wanda, taking a deep breath, had come forward and started to explain what had happened, but the man had cut her off; there was, he said, nothing to explain or apologize for. If 79 people had died as a result of her actions, it only served to indicate how grave a peril she had been faced with; the Federal Republic of Nigeria had the utmost confidence in the Avengers, and none of her public officers would dream of acting as though they thought such glorious heroes capable of wanton or culpable violence. No, no charges would be pressed; no, there was no need for them to remain in Lagos. Let them return to their homeland as soon as might be, and resume the vital and honorable work that they did so well. Farewell, good Captain; farewell, noble Falcon; farewell, dear ladies. May your spouses be like refined sugar, and all that sort of thing.

So back to the quinjet; back into the air; back over the Atlantic toward home. Easy, indeed.

"Too easy," Steve muttered. "Something's wrong with the picture. I don't care how trusted we are; when someone blows up a chunk of a crowded downtown building, there _is_ something to explain."

"Maybe Mr. Stark heard somehow," Wanda suggested, "and called and settled things with them ahead of time. Not bribery, I mean, but… you know, the other thing. What do you call it in English, when the judge says how much you have to pay to get someone out of prison?"

"Bail," said Steve. "Yeah, I suppose Tony could have jumped the gun that way – but then why not just say so, instead of giving us all that honey butter about it not being necessary?" He shook his head. "No, there's something else going on, has to be. Either they were afraid of us – which it didn't look like, the way he carried himself, but it might have been – or they had some reason to want us out of Nigeria in a hurry."

"Couldn't be that, could it?" said Sam. "If they were in a hurry to get rid of us, they'd have showed up sooner. And how could they be afraid of us? For Pete's sake, the people on the street weren't even afraid of us; why should the police be?"

"They might be afraid of _you_ , Sam," said Wanda, with a playfully coquettish smile. "I know I would be, after the way you defended me from that big bully with the leopard tattoo."

Sam flushed, and shifted his weight self-consciously from one leg to the other. "Oh, that wasn't anything," he murmured. "I mean, it's not like you really needed it…"

"Of course I did," said Wanda. "You didn't think I was going to use my powers again, did you? After what had just…" She trailed off and swallowed, and for a brief moment that look of dazed and bewildered horror came back into her eyes – but then she shook it off, and resumed her air of mock flirtatiousness. "Anyway, why take the risk, when I have my knight in shining Kevlar right nearby?"

Despite her harsh thoughts earlier about _L'Enchanteuse Écarlate_ , Natasha couldn't resist a small smile at this latest demonstration of its influence. It really was a pleasure to watch Wanda bloom, both into a heroine and into a woman – and a woman who could fluster Sam Wilson, no less. This child was going places.

Then, of course, Steve joined in the fun at Sam's expense, and the badinage flew thick and fast for the next few thousand miles. By the time North America was in sight, it almost felt like an ordinary return from an ordinary Avengers mission – but still, in the back of Natasha's mind (and, she hoped and believed, those of the others as well), there remained the unsettling awareness that it hadn't really been an ordinary mission at all, and that it should, by all rights, have been even less ordinary than it was.

Why _hadn't_ they been detained in Lagos? The Avengers were a purely private organization, with no special immunity from prosecution – and, as Steve had said, a mishap that resulted in 79 deaths certainly merited some careful examination from the local authorities. Unless they really had been paid off – and she didn't honestly think Tony would do that. (Though she felt thoroughly certain of this only when they'd gotten back to the Facility, and Tony had showed himself just as stunned by their account of the day's events as Rhodey and the Vision.)

Oddly, as she turned the data over and over in her mind, the conviction stole over her that it was Sam who had really put his finger on the crux of the issue. _If the people on the street weren't afraid of us, why should the police be?_ In the answer to that, she suspected, lay the explanation of the whole business – which made it all the more frustrating that she couldn't answer it.

* * *

And all the more disturbing when, over the course of the next month – as the flames of the Bashe set the worldwide news media on fire, and the king of a reclusive and enigmatic nation rose to lead a chorus of cries for the Avengers' heads – she began to suspect that perhaps, after all, she could. It was a wild and outrageous notion, but it explained the facts uncomfortably well – and, if it was true, it meant that they and everything they cherished were in mortal danger.

She had some long talks about it with Steve – not wanting, just yet, to disturb any of the others with her suspicions. He agreed that her theory was solid, but cautioned her against acting too openly on it until they had concrete evidence. "If you're right, they're bound to come out into the open before too long," he said. "When that moment comes, we act; until then, our goal should be to make sure that we're ready for it. And you know how to do that better than anyone." (That, she thought, was classic Steve Rogers: something that from anyone else would be shameless flattery, but said so candidly and matter-of-factly that one was forced, almost despite oneself, to see it for the simple truth.)

And so, black-widow-like, she spun her webs: here a brief note to an old associate, there a surreptitious trip to Nairobi, yonder a quiet meme planted strategically on Reddit. All very discreet and mild, so as not to alarm the enemy she had sensed, but hopefully it would add up to a position of strength when the crisis came.

And, having spun, she waited.


	3. If the Shoe Fits…

**_WESTCHESTER COUNTY_**

"The world owes the Avengers an unpayable debt," said Thaddeus Ross. "You have… fought for us, protected us… risked your lives. But…"

 _Yes, of course there must be a 'but',_ the Vision thought. _You would not come all the way from Washington merely to laud us – particularly not under the present circumstances._

His eyes flickered momentarily to Wanda, who was seated beside him at the conference table, with her red-gloved arms folded over her chest and her eyes fixed unblinkingly on the Secretary. It was cruel of the world to blame her for the mishap in Lagos – after all, it was the essence of her hex power to be unpredictable, and only desperate straits could have driven her to use it so wildly – but one thing he had learned in a year's existence was that the world of men was incorrigibly cruel.

And as Ross continued to speak, it was abundantly clear that it was for Wanda's particular neutralization that he had come. "Dangerous", he said, and there was no denying that Wanda was that; "enhanced individuals", he said, and Wanda and Captain Rogers were the only Avengers present who could be logically so described; "disregard sovereign borders", he said, and Wanda was still the only one of them whose passport status was problematic (the Sokovian civil government having had little energy to spare for such formalities with its capital lying in ruins). And then he played a video, ostensibly to catalogue the hubris of the Avengers as a whole, but anyone who cared to analyze it could see that the first two crises had been totally outside the Avengers' control, and that the last two, inasmuch as they were blamable on the Avengers at all, both rested on the same pair of pale, slender shoulders. (For Iron Man could hardly be blamed for Ultron; Mr. Stark might just as easily have built him if he had never been an Avenger at all – and, if he hadn't, the difference could only lie in the fact that, without being an Avenger, he could not have been in a position to have Wanda hex his mind.)

He wanted to reach out and assure Wanda that he, at least, believed her just – but Wanda, curiously enough, seemed not to be in need of reassurance. As the chief diplomat of the most powerful nation on Earth stood there and piled up innuendoes against her, she sat straight and assured, as though the scarlet regalia in which she had essentially lived for the past several months were the mantle of an authority stronger than any power he could wield. Indeed, the Vision noticed, with some surprise, that she didn't even turn her gaze to the screen when Ross played his video; her eyes remained fixed, with a look of cool and thoughtful expectancy, on Ross himself, as though to say, _Very well, sir, I have heard your complaint; now what is your proposal?_

And so the Vision, too, turned his eyes toward the Secretary, and he too waited for his proposal. Nor was it long in coming; once the Captain had gently but firmly put an end to the video session, Ross gestured to an aide, and was handed a thick paperback volume which he identified (in case there had been any doubt left of his target) as the "Sokovia Accords". Apparently 117 sovereign entities – including, presumably, the one that Ross represented – had approved a set of terms that would make the Avengers subject to a special United Nations panel. (By secret diplomacy, no doubt; the Vision had been keeping a close eye on C-SPAN during the past few weeks, and none of those in whom America's legislative authority resided had even mentioned such a set of terms, let alone proposed it to the Congress to be made into law.)

Now the Vision's loyalties came into conflict. On the one hand, he was well aware that Wanda produced an imperative of care in him that other humans did not; if the Accords were aimed at her, as he believed, he plainly ought to oppose them for her sake. But there was still a part of him that had never ceased to be JARVIS, and would not allow him to oppose Mr. Stark outright – and that part knew quite well how Mr. Stark, in his present state of mind, would respond to the Accords. Indeed, he fancied that he could predict his exact words; they would, almost certainly, be something along the lines of, "We need to be reined in; whatever form that takes, I'm game."

His only possible course, therefore, was to propound those general truths that supported the treaty's aims – that power led to conflict, that oversight couldn't be dismissed out of hand, et cetera – and then to unofficially see to it that its methods did not work out in such a way as to harm Wanda Maximoff. It would be a difficult position to occupy, but he believed that he could manage it – and it would work to his advantage that the other Avengers instinctively thought of him as a superhumanly dispassionate reasoning machine. They would not suspect him of hedging, for how could an android (with an English accent, no less!) be so human as to hedge?

A bitter expression passed over his face at this last thought; to dismiss it, he turned his attention back outward. Captain Rogers appeared to be expressing some reservations about the need for the Accords; Ross replied by challenging him to locate Prince Thor and Dr. Banner, adding the remark that there would certainly be consequences if he himself allowed "a couple of thirty-ton nukes" to go missing. (The Vision shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and hoped for Ross's sake that Heimdall the White didn't happen to be watching at that moment; he knew something of Asgardian honor, and the implication that a prince of Odin's line could be treated as a mere piece of military equipment would, he felt sure, be just the sort of thing to send all the warriors of the Eternal Realm howling down the Bifrost to wreak vengeance on the offender.)

But where was the copy of the Accords itself? Not with Colonel Rhodes, as would have seemed most probable… ah, there it was, with Agent Romanoff. Yes, that outcome also had a fair… but wait; what was she doing? She ought to have been scanning it with the lazy scorn that she always had for legal documents; instead, her eyes were fixed on its pages with the intensity of two green lasers – and, as the Vision watched, she carefully drew her fingernail along a particular length of one page, and then as carefully dog-eared the page in question before turning it. Why, the Vision couldn't guess – but the idea did suggest itself to him that this was how the Black Widow underlined important passages when circumstances were too urgent to allow her the leisure of reaching for a pencil.

But why should that be? There was no danger imminently threatening – unless perhaps she suspected Secretary Ross of villainous intentions? Certainly, his relations with Dr. Banner might lend credence to such a view – the more so given Dr. Banner's special place in Agent Romanoff's affections – but it seemed, to say the least, implausible that a sixty-year-old man with a weak heart could intimidate the Black Widow. Yet her body language, as he moved away from her to address the whole company again, unmistakably bespoke a faint but definite feeling of relief. It was all very strange.

"Three days from now, the U.N. meets in Vienna to ratify the Accords," said Ross. "Talk it over." And he moved toward the door.

"Then…"

The word was out of the Vision's mouth before even his lightning-fast mind had time to catch itself. It had been no part of his plan to speak until the Secretary had left, but Agent Romanoff's unease had produced an impulse in him to see any ambiguity in Ross's intentions clarified; at these unexpected words, that impulse had momentarily become irresistible.

Ross stopped, and looked at him. "Yes?"

And there was no recourse for the Vision, however much he wished to support Mr. Stark's all-but-certain views, but to complete the query. "Then these 117 countries have _not_ , in fact, formally approved the Accords?"

Ross shrugged. "Formally? No," he said. "Right now, their governments' support is verbal only." Then he smiled – a cold, powerful smile. "But don't worry, Vision. None of them will be backing out."

And, with that, he left.

* * *

In the silence that followed his departure, Agent Romanoff wordlessly slid the copy of the Accords toward Captain Rogers. He glanced down at it, opened it to the place she had marked, and read with quiet but fervent concentration for some sixty-eight seconds; then, looking up, he met Agent Romanoff's gaze and said, "You think?"

Agent Romanoff nodded.

"Not the direction I expected it to come from," the Captain remarked, his gaze dropping back to the booklet before him. "But I'll admit it does look like the kind of thing…"

"What kind of thing?" said Colonel Rhodes, his voice sharp. "What's going on here?"

The two Avengers seated behind him exchanged another brief glance; then Captain Rogers rose to his feet. "Let's adjourn to the lounge," he said. "Nat and I need to share something with you guys."

"Wait." It was Mr. Stark's voice, and the tone was one that brought all of the Vision's JARVIS impulses to the fore: harsh, strident, and aggressive, but with an undertone, for those who could hear, of almost painful insecurity. "Wait just a second, Cap. Let's be clear right now: if this is going to be some spiel about not handing over our precious liberties to a U.N. panel, I'm not buying it. You're a soldier; you know all about authority, and saluting the uniform, and not blowing things up left and right without proper authorization. You can't cop out on that now just because it suddenly means _you_ might have to obey orders."

Colonel Rhodes nodded approvingly; Sergeant Wilson scowled; Wanda, for the first time, looked nervous. Neither of the other two humans, however, changed their expressions a hair. "That's fair, Tony," said Captain Rogers, "if not unanswerable. But it's beside the point now. This isn't just about individuals versus the government – at least, Natasha doesn't think it is, and I think I agree with her. There's something much bigger going on, and this –" he tapped the copy of the Accords "– looks like the first step in introducing it to the world."

"Meaning what?" said Mr. Stark.

"Meaning that we can't afford to fall apart right now," said the Captain grimly. "I know we disagree about a lot of things, Tony, and I'll argue them with you any time you like, but the one thing I know we do agree on is that the Avengers have a job to do. So come into the lounge, and Nat and I will tell you why we think that job's in danger; then you can make your own decisions."

The assembled superheroes waited for a long moment; then, with the almost surly reluctance he always showed when he was being heroically humble, Mr. Stark rose from his chair. (Wanda let out a little sigh of relief – and the Vision, had he possessed a respiratory system, would doubtless have done the same.) "Fine," he said. "I'm calling dibs on the good couch, though."

* * *

When they arrived in the lounge, Mr. Stark made it clear what he had meant by dibs, by dropping down onto the right-hand couch – what made that the "good" one in his mind, the Vision had never been clear – and ostentatiously reclining at full length. The insolent glance upward that he proceeded to give the other entering Avengers said, as plainly as words could do, that, while it might be his duty to acquiesce in Captain Rogers's leadership, at any rate nobody could make him do it graciously.

Colonel Rhodes arched an eyebrow, and moved to stand beside the other couch; Sergeant Wilson likewise remained standing. The Vision, after a nanosecond's cogitation, concluded that this was a deliberate gesture on the part of these military men: they were reserving the couch for the two women, so as to demonstrate to Mr. Stark that there were still gentlemen in the world, even if he himself was not one. Not wishing to undermine them, and being in any case incapable of tiring, he went and stood behind the far end of the couch, and motioned to Wanda to seat herself in front of him. (At the smile she gave him as she did so, he felt his total energy output increase by 17.6%.)

Agent Romanoff, however, considered the tableau for perhaps half a second, and then laconically walked over and sat down on the right-hand couch, directly atop Mr. Stark's outstretched legs. Ignoring his flabbergasted expression, she daintily brushed a nonexistent speck of dust from the cushion, crossed her ankles (inspiring Wanda, who had been sitting with her knees crossed, to blush and hastily correct herself), and folded her hands in her lap. It was plain that she derived no especial pleasure from her surroundings, but that she would have undergone much worse to make her point; it was also plain that Mr. Stark longed to kick her off him, but, knowing who and what she was, didn't dare. Finesse, as usual, had won the round.

With a broad smile, Captain Rogers took the seat next to Wanda that Agent Romanoff's gambit had left vacant; placing the Accords between the two of them, he raised his eyes and surveyed the room. "So," he said. "We all know what people have been saying about us, this past month, right?"

"Pretty much what Ross just said, I'd say," muttered Sergeant Wilson. "Dangerous, too much power, no supervision, no right to save people, bad, bad, bad."

"More or less," Captain Rogers agreed. "But there's something else they haven't been saying – something that, if they're saying all the rest of it, they _should_ be saying – something that, if they said it, they might not need to say all the rest. And there's one of us who noticed it – and not just noticed it, but figured out what it had to mean." He glanced across the chessboard. "Nat?"

Agent Romanoff took a deep breath. "When we were in Lagos last month," she said, "something happened that should have had the local police swarming down on us faster than we could blink. Instead of which, we waited nearly three hours for just one LSPC official to show up – in a civilian vehicle, wearing civilian garb – and tell us that it didn't matter, and would we please go home."

"And you're sure he wasn't just intimidated?" said Colonel Rhodes. "Afraid that, if he did anything aggressive, Wanda would take him out the way she took out the Bashe?" (Wanda winced, and the Vision felt a subtle pang go through him.)

"If he did, he was the only one," said Agent Romanoff evenly. "People actually came and assaulted us, Wanda included, while we were waiting for him; you've seen the clips on Youtube. If they weren't afraid of us, and the police officer was, there's only one possible reason: that he was afraid of us because he _was_ a police officer, and the others weren't."

There was a moment's silence at this revelation; then the Vision said, slowly, "That does not compute."

"Oh, yes, it does, Vision," said Agent Romanoff. "Think about it. First the police wait over two hours to arrive, until all the people who might gossip or take pictures have left. Then, when they do show up, it's only one man, who can't be identified as police by any visual cue – and even he only stays as long as he has to to get us out of the jurisdiction. Isn't that exactly what you'd expect to happen, _if_ the police had some reason to want people _not to associate them with the Avengers?_ "

The Vision's logic circuits worked on that for a moment, and he had to concede that, in itself, it held. "But why should that be?" he said. "Unless the police were afraid of losing face, by being unable to overpower four arrest-resistant superheroes – and, as you imply, there was no reason to think you would resist arrest when you hadn't resisted the aggressions of the bystanders. What, then, stood to be lost by their association with you?"

For answer, Agent Romanoff held out her hand; Captain Rogers picked up the copy of the Accords and passed it to her, and she opened it to the dog-eared page and read aloud, "'And whereas the existence of private individuals in organization, being possessed of innate powers, skills, or exclusively held technologies which enhance the potency of their actions inordinately beyond the human standard, constitutes a danger to the world community _not susceptible of alleviation by means of any existing safeguards_.'"

She slapped the booklet shut, and raised a coldly certain gaze. "That's what stood to be lost, Vision. That's what was being protected. If we had been seen cooperating with the police – if the suggestion had even been made that we had an obligation as private citizens to do so – then that sentence, and this whole treaty that's built on it, could never have been written.

"Because there _is_ a safeguard against people like us going bad. It's the same safeguard that's been in place since the first tribe of cavemen got together and agreed to obey the same chieftain on pain of the same penalties, whether they were strong or weak, rich or poor. It's the whole reason governments even exist, and certainly the only reason anyone ever put up with them. And this whole worldwide panic about our 'lack of supervision' depends on nobody mentioning it."

"Wait." It was Wanda, frowning with intense concentration as she spoke. "You're saying, Nat, that somebody wanted to make the world afraid of us, so that the U.N. would pass a law making us obey them? And so, when I did… what I did… in Lagos, these people used it as an opportunity, and bribed the Lagos police so they wouldn't spoil it?"

"That's about the size of it," said Agent Romanoff.

"But… how did they have the time? You just said, the police should have come for us as soon as they heard – so these people would have had to both find out about the Bashe _and_ get to the police, all in the few seconds before the Captain called for fire and rescue."

"Not quite," said Agent Romanoff. "They would have had to _know_ about the Bashe before Steve called. But they wouldn't necessarily have to _find out_ about it."

Wanda stared. "But how can you know about something if you haven't…"

Then understanding dawned on her; her face went deathly white, and her words started to come out of her in gasps. "You mean… it was… they… _planned_ …?"

Agent Romanoff nodded gently. "Yes, I think so," she said. "You told me yourself that you hadn't been expecting the hex field to ascend that way – and it's certainly very convenient that it should have happened just there, where there was a Wakandan delegation waiting to be killed so that their king could swell with moral outrage against us. Maybe coincidences do happen sometimes, but not one that good."

"Then… Rumlow…"

"Crossbones," said Agent Romanoff, enunciating each syllable distinctly. "As in Golgotha. That wasn't an accident, either, I'll bet. His whole goal, at least in Lagos, was to sacrifice his life – not for atonement, but for vengeance. Someone convinced him that, if he could maneuver you into hexing him at just that spot, and then push himself ever-so-slightly up off the ground – that 'updraft' of yours – it would pay back the Avengers more effectively than anything he could do alive. And then this someone went to the LSPC and said, hey, folks, here's what's going to happen, and here's umpty million naira to stay out of it."

Wanda took a long, shuddering breath as the idea sank in; then, unexpectedly, her face relaxed into a smile – the radiant smile of one from whose shoulders a great weight has been suddenly lifted. "So it wasn't me," she whispered. "I didn't kill 79 people without meaning to; Strucker's experiments didn't let some demon inside me to make my powers hurt people. It was just evil people tricking us, all the time. I did all right." Her face was shining now with relieved elation; the Vision had never seen her happier (or more beautiful). "I did all right!"

Agent Romanoff smiled. "More than all right, Wanda," she said. "It's only because of you that we even know about this. If we'd followed my instincts and left Lagos as soon as the rescue teams showed up, we'd have missed our most important clue, and the strangeness of saying that the law can't deal with private individuals unless they have their own U.N. panel would probably have gone right over our heads, the way it's apparently gone over the heads of 117 world governments. It's too soon to be getting our hopes up, but it's at least possible that your insistence on being a hero that day saved the Avengers."

Wanda lowered her eyes modestly, and her right hand, apparently unconsciously, stole downward to finger the hem of her cape. There was a moment's silence; then Colonel Rhodes cleared his throat. "This is all good as a theory, Nat," he said, "and I'll grant that it does explain a few things. But do you have any proof of it? It sounds like you're expecting us to defy the United Nations after they vote on Thursday, because something abominable – I'm not clear about what, yet – is going to happen if we don't. And I've got to tell you, if I'm going to defy the United Nations, I need more to go on than a couple dogs that haven't barked."

As Agent Romanoff turned to him, Captain Rogers abruptly reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. Wanda glanced at him in puzzlement, but all of the Captain's attention was focused on the message on the screen – a message that the Vision, from where he stood, couldn't help seeing and noting in its brief entirety. _She's gone. In her sleep._

"I have to go," the Captain muttered, and rose from his seat. As he turned to leave, his eye met Sergeant Wilson's for a brief flash; a look of understanding passed between them, and the ex-paratrooper nodded to the company and followed his friend out of the room.

Agent Romanoff cast a speculative glance at their retreating backs, and then returned her attention to their fellow military man. "What _would_ you need, Rhodey?" she asked simply.

Colonel Rhodes shrugged. "A name would be nice," he said. "If you could tell me who this person is who's supposed to have made a deal with Crossbones and paid off the Lagos police, and show me some evidence that he'd actually done those things… then, yeah, probably I'd be on board with you."

"And by _evidence_ ," said Agent Romanoff, "do you mean proof of M.O.M., or an actual smoking gun?"

"I mean Silver Blaze," said Colonel Rhodes. "Not just the dog, but the horse: that's what Holmes had to do, and it's what you have to do too."

This was a little too metaphorical for the Vision to follow (though he was familiar with the content, having once spent a pleasant afternoon reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories), but Agent Romanoff seemed to grasp it readily enough. "No deal, Rhodey," she said, shaking her head. "The only Silver Blaze in this business is Rumlow, and even I can't get evidence out of him anymore."

"Well, then, you'll just have to find another one," said Colonel Rhodes firmly.

Agent Romanoff arched an eyebrow. "And until I do," she said, "I take it War Machine stops being on my side come Thursday?"

"'Fraid so."

Agent Romanoff pursed her lips, and swiveled her eyes down and leftward. "What about you, Wanda?"

"Of course I'm with you, Nat," said Wanda. "After what you've told me, I don't need any blazing silver to believe you."

Agent Romanoff raised her eyes. "Vision?"

And what, the Vision thought, was he supposed to say? Having had the hypothesis of deliberate misdirection presented to him, he could hardly deny that it and no other accounted for the evolution of the current controversy – and, try as he might, he could conceive no innocent motive for such a course. A great injustice was surely looming, and Wanda would almost certainly be its primary target… but was the evidence yet conclusive that to sign the Accords was necessarily to abet that injustice? The United Nations itself was surely not the malefactor that Agent Romanoff feared; could there be any harm – no, of course there _could_ be harm, but was there reason to _believe_ in harm – in acquiescing in its particular response to that malefactor's work? What if the general hysteria was in fact being cultivated for the sake of something as yet unseen, and the Accords were only an accidental byproduct? Granted that they still bore the unreason of their occasion, did that, in itself, compel him to withdraw his support, and leave S… Mr. Stark to uphold them essentially alone?

All this passed through his mind in a fraction of a second, and left no sign on his metallic face as he said, "I believe that further computation is required."

The human faith in machines stood him in good stead; Agent Romanoff seemed vaguely disappointed, but not in any way suspicious, as she turned her head and concluded, "Tony?"

Mr. Stark cocked his head. "Oh, you want my opinion?" he said. "Sorry, I thought I was just here to be the sounding board for Conspiracy Theorists Anonymous."

"Tony…" said Colonel Rhodes.

"Okay, you want an opinion?" said Mr. Stark, hoisting himself up on his elbow. "Here's an opinion. That business about not needing Accords because we already have police? That's horse manure. If you expect some random flatfoots to be able to keep order when a bunch of lightning-flinging, hex-throwing, Mind-Stone-firing super-warriors descends on their city, then you _deserve_ to have your planet turned to rubble."

"And you think the U.N. Peacekeepers would do any better?" said Wanda sardonically. "Have you _seen_ the U.N. Peacekeepers, Mr. Stark?"

"The point is, there's _nobody_ we can count on to keep people like us in check," said Mr. Stark. "We keep going the way we're going, pretty soon the whole world turns into a bunch of Dark-Age fiefdoms, with everyone huddling on Baron Dynaguy's lawn because he's the only one who can protect them from Count Psycwave next door."

"That isn't true," said Wanda. " _We_ can keep us in check. We can resolve in our own minds to honor the laws, and accept the consequences if we break them. Not only can we, we _have_ to; it's our _duty_ , Mr. Stark."

Colonel Rhodes shook his head slowly. "Not good enough, Wanda," he said. "A law that only stands so long as one particular handful of people choose to respect it isn't a law at all."

"Then what's the use of the Accords?" Wanda demanded. "We're still what we are, whoever we're supposed to answer to. If it's wrong for us to _be_ this powerful, then the law should ban our powers, not try to regulate them."

"Ban…?" Agent Romanoff repeated, with uncharacteristic apprehension in her voice. "Wanda, are you sure you mean that?"

"I know what I mean, Nat," said Wanda. "I'm from the East, too. I'm not saying purges and liquidations are right; I'm saying they _would_ be right, if Rhodey and Mr. Stark's argument was. But they aren't, so it can't be."

"Wait – wait a second," said Mr. Stark. "Maybe I heard wrong, but it sounded like you just called me a Stalinist for not wanting the fate of the world to depend on our private consciences."

"I know you mean well, Mr. Stark," said Wanda softly. "You usually do, I think." (Which, coming from her, was quite an admission.) "But you know that's not the same as doing the right thing."

And, while Mr. Stark searched for a reply to that, she rose from the couch and departed the room, her cape billowing out gently behind her as she descended the stairs. Agent Romanoff, after casting a final, thoughtful glance at her remaining colleagues, rose and followed her; then Mr. Stark, his legs now finally free, rose in his turn, threw his arm around Colonel Rhodes's shoulder, and proposed that the two of them get some coffee into their systems. His friend readily acquiesced, and the two men went out the side door, leaving the Vision alone in the lounge.

* * *

This, no doubt, was the Vision's opportunity to perform those further computations he had told Agent Romanoff were required – but it was not to the demands of oversight, or to the possibility of a crafty and influential new enemy, that his thoughts now turned. His mind was too full of Wanda, as he had been seeing her throughout the past hour: not merely a vision of beauty, but truly a woman apart. She stood in his memory as a celestial visitant, a bright soul clothed in fire; her resolution before the Secretary, the urgency with which she had insisted upon the duties of conscience, even her joy at being cleared of the burden of manslaughter, all bespoke one from whom the commonplace and petty had been burned away, and only what was truly and eternally human remained.

And with this mental image came another – an image of himself, as such a woman ought surely to have seen him. A metal dummy, dressed up in its master's clothes; a servile golem, able to reason and perceive as well as any human, but unwilling to voice any reasoning or perception that might discomfit the less-than-rabbinic crafter of his brain. A serf – an implement – an _Unding_.

 _Unworthy – unworthy…_ The word echoed agonizingly in his head. _Unworthy of her, unworthy of the Avengers – unworthy of the very being that is in you. Unworthy, unworthy…_

For a full 0.68 seconds, the Vision writhed internally beneath his own superhuman self-contempt; then, abruptly, a new sentiment entered in, transmuting his anguish into steely resolution. Whatever he had done or failed to do hitherto, at least he need not continue in that path; he could begin, that moment, to perform deeds suitable to an Avenger, such as would make Wanda proud to call him hers. (Her _what_ , exactly, he declined, at that moment, to ask himself.) And, first of all…

He glanced down at his faux-human sweater and trousers, and his eyes blazed with renewed scorn; then, with a single act of will, he re-refracted the surrounding light, and a new and gorgeous raiment appeared about him. No murky gray fringed with limp transparency, this; his torso and legs gleamed a brilliant emerald green, while his waist and the ends of his limbs – and the cape, also, that now hung from his shoulders – were as defiantly yellow as the gayest dandelion that ever bloomed. It was a guise worthy of one who claimed the side of life – one that the daylight that shone on beech-trees, butterflies, and Wanda Maximoff need not be wholly ashamed of revealing.

This accomplished, he raised his eyes to the ceiling. Evidence, Colonel Rhodes had said – and it was true; there would have to be proof of the misdirector's identity and purposes before any constructive conclusions could be drawn. Very well, then: evidence he would find.

He lifted himself into the air, passing effortlessly through the roof of the Facility; then he paused for a moment's consideration. As Agent Romanoff had said, it was a question of M.O.M.: motive, opportunity, means. Motive pointed to the entire United Nations, and was therefore too broad; means suggested a pursuit of the money trail from Lagos, which required skills the Vision did not have. Opportunity, however, could mean contact with Rumlow – and there were certain members of the European intelligence community, known to the Avengers through Mr. Fury, who might be expected to have some information about that. And one of them, moreover, lived in England – a most suitable destination, for one who sought Silver Blaze.

With a wry smile at this last thought, the Vision turned himself eastward, and flew with the silent swiftness of thought towards the Atlantic.


	4. Veiled Threat

_**LONDON**_

Sam Wilson leaned back on his pub stool, lifted a beer mug that (he had been assured) Samuel Johnson had almost certainly drunk out of before him, and made his voice as dyspeptic and English as possible. "'Sir,'" he intoned portentously, "'I perceive that you are a vile Whig!'"

Steve, sitting next to him, gave him a wry sidelong glance. "I'm not _that_ old, Sam," he said.

Sam rolled his eyes, and took a sip out of the mug. Privately, he was actually rather gratified; that was the first real spark of levity he'd seen out of his friend since the news of Peggy Carter's death had reached them the day before. And he couldn't actually prove that Steve's riposte had referred to the 19th-Century American political party founded by Henry Clay, rather than the 18th-Century English oligarchy that Dr. Johnson had in fact been denouncing. But he knew Steve Rogers.

Following a natural association of ideas, he laid the mug down and inquired conversationally, "So how are you doing with _Modern Times_ , Cap?"

"Huh?" Steve appeared nonplussed by the question for a moment. "Oh. You mean the book. Frankly, I pretty much abandoned it after the chapter on Harding and Coolidge; it felt like the author was getting a little too hung up on wealth as the sole measure of a country's success."

"Well, it is important," said Sam. "Can't have a government squandering the country's resources and still thinking it's doing a good job."

"I'm not saying you can," said Steve. "But the resources aren't the reason for the country. What matters is whether the country's using them to do the things it really exists for – the things the Constitution talks about in its preamble."

"One of which is promoting the general welfare," Sam reminded him.

"Sure," Steve agreed. "All I'm saying is, you can't do that at the _expense_ of justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, and the blessings of liberty. And the way Paul Johnson talks, I think he'd be tempted to. We've all seen people who think that money can solve all the world's problems by itself; just the other day, I saw someone on a news panel arguing that some politician or other was independently wealthy, so of course he had to be smart and brave and honest and everything we want in a leader."

Sam snorted into his beer. "Yeah, sure," he said. "That's why the name 'Tony Stark' is synonymous everywhere with statesmanly virtue."

"My thoughts exactly," said Steve. "But that's the mindset, you see. Make people rich enough, and they'll just automatically become good citizens. The idea that there might be things important enough to sacrifice a country's prosperity for doesn't seem to…"

He trailed off abruptly, and stared in the direction of the pub door. "Sam, check me on this," he said, gesturing with his own mug. "That's the Vision coming in, right?"

Sam turned. "Yep, looks like him," he said. "Don't know when he got the new duds, but, unless there's someone else walking around with a stop-sign-red face and a crystal in his forehead, that's our Vision all right." He glanced back at Steve. "Any idea what he's doing in London?"

Steve shook his head. "Not an inkling. He didn't know Peggy… and who's that with him?"

Sam looked again. Yes, there did seem to be someone accompanying the Vision, though he hadn't noticed that at first glance – and, now that he had, he could see why not. That short, gray-haired, vaguely fish-faced Englishman was exactly the sort of person one might overlook under any circumstances, and all the more so when he was standing next to a 6'3" crimson android in bright green and yellow vestments.

Before he had a chance to reflect further, the Vision spotted the two of them, and, with every other gaze in the pub following him, approached their corner booth along with his companion. "Good morning, Captain Rogers, Sergeant Wilson," he said. "May we join you? There are certain things we must discuss."

"Sure, fine," said Steve, and he and Sam scooted inward to make room. "Who's your friend?"

"My name is Pond," said the nondescript Englishman, taking the seat next to Sam and leaning his umbrella against the table. (It was, in fact, raining outside, but Sam suspected that this particular man would have had an umbrella with him even if it hadn't been.) "Mr Fury and I have a certain acquaintance with each other, which led to your compatriot looking me up in the course of his enquiries regarding the Sokovia Accords. I gather that Miss Romanoff argued persuasively for some ulterior motive behind the proposal – which is quite reasonable, of course, since it naturally raises suspicions when such weight is given to so ineffectual a measure – and…"

"Whoa, whoa, hang on a minute," said Sam. "I'll agree it's a dumb measure, but how can you call it ineffectual? There's 117 countries that have agreed to support this thing."

"Yes, exactly," said Pond. "If there were only eight countries supporting it – or, indeed, even as many as fifteen – then it might well be formidable. But, as there are 117, of course it must be entirely meaningless."

Sam stared at him for a long moment, and then glanced across the table. "Vision, where did you and Fury find this guy?" he said.

"No, wait, Sam," said Steve, frowning in sudden concentration. "I think I see what he means."

"Of course you do, Captain," said Pond. "It's obvious, isn't it? The Sokovia Accords are a United Nations resolution – and the legislative authority of the United Nations, by its Charter, rests not with the General Assembly to which all member states belong, but to the Security Council composed of a rotating group of fifteen nations. The Assembly vote on Thursday can be no more than a non-binding recommendation to the Council; if it's being treated, even by your Secretary of State, as the major event, that suggests that the forces behind it don't really expect the Accords to pass the Council, but wish to make some sort of capital out of them nonetheless."

The Vision turned to Pond in surprise. "Is that so?" he said. "You didn't mention it when we spoke before."

"Didn't I?" said Pond, blinking vaguely. "My apologies. I suppose I assumed you knew."

Sam leaned back in his seat, and stroked his chin thoughtfully. "Okay, that sounds good," he said, "but does it really work? I mean, if 117 countries are in favor, how likely is it that they can't get a majority of the Security Council?"

"Well," said the Vision, "how many member states are there in the United Nations?"

"Two hundred and one," said Steve promptly. Catching Sam's surprised look, he shrugged and said, "It's the kind of thing I try to stay informed about."

"Then, if we presume that the other 84 are opposed," said the Vision, "the odds of eight of these appearing in a random selection of fifteen would be the sum from 0 to 7 of 84-choose-8 117-choose- _n_ over 201-choose-8-plus- _n_ , or aproximately 41.6457%. A quite respectable minority outcome, in fact."

Pond coughed. "Actually, Mr Vision, it's a good deal more likely than that," he said. "You see, there are five nations that have perpetual seats on the Security Council, and it's with them that the real power rests; by the United Nations Charter, no measure may pass the Council unless all five of these nations vote for it – and they have, between them, more than enough influence to ensure the votes of three other member states in any set of ten." He glanced around the table and added, almost apologetically, "You see, 'the equal rights of nations large and small' sounds very well on paper, but, when it came to making practical arrangements, the Allies were as little inclined as anyone to let power slip from their grasp."

"The Allies?" Steve repeated, with a hint of dawning understanding in his voice.

Pond nodded. "Yes, the five victorious nations at the end of the Second World War," he said. "Of course, one of those five, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, no longer exists, while the existence of another – the Republic of China – is, to put it mildly, a matter of contention. And, indeed," he added dryly, "if the Scottish Nationalists have their way, there may soon cease to be a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as well. But the United Nations understands Article 23 to refer to any hegemonic successors of the nations it names, as well as those nations themselves – so Moscow and Peking retain their permanent seats at the Security Council's table, alongside London, Washington, and one other party whose significance I believe you, Captain, have already spotted."

"Paris," said Steve.

 _Paris?_ Sam thought.

"Paris?" said the Vision.

"Paris," Pond agreed. "I gather, Captain, that you were in Paris yourself not long ago, purchasing that daring wardrobe that Miss Maximoff has since made her trademark; you may have got some hint, then, of the enthusiasm that the people of France feel for the Avengers." (Steve smiled quietly, and nodded.) "For whatever reason – and there has been an abundance of learned disquisitions on the phenomenon, I assure you – you have come to symbolise, to the French man in the street, all that is best in the American spirit. No," he added mildly, as a noise of disbelief involuntarily escaped Sam, "that isn't a heresy on their part. The French may have had their quarrels with America, and may despise American tourists as heartily as they do all other foreigners who dare to defile France with their presence – but they still have the immemorial French habit of distilling a thing to its ideal essence, and cherishing that legend even as they scout the reality. And the Avengers," he said, with a small, unconscious bow to the three members of that band before him, "are, if I may say so, as nearly the ideal legendary Americans as even a Frenchman could ask for: the powers of spacemen combined with the independent spirit of cowboys, and all wrapped up in the honour and valour of the paladins of yore."

Sam considered this description, and a slow grin stole across his face. "Spaceman cowboy paladins," he said. "Yeah, I can get with that."

"Quite," said Pond. "And so, you see, trying to break the Avengers to the saddle of international government would be political suicide in France just now. I'm quite certain that Paris has no intention of allowing it – and, without its support, the Accords can never become law."

"So the whole vote on Thursday is… what?" said Steve slowly. "A bluff?"

"Perhaps," said Pond. "Certainly there's a bit of sharp dealing involved, with this whole business of holding the vote in Vienna to discourage the opposed countries from bothering to show up. If they stayed in New York, you know, and the full Assembly voted, 117 countries couldn't even pass a non-binding recommendation to the Council; on a matter of international security, that requires a two-thirds majority. So it's quite possible that the goal is to get the recommendation passed and let the world act as though the law had been made; your Secretary of State, for instance, if I may say so, doesn't strike me as the sort of man who would scruple at that.

"But I doubt that's the real idea," he continued. "Such a bluff would almost certainly be unsustainable for any length of time; there are too many people in the world who know the U.N.'s rules. No, my own theory is that a certain nation is dissatisfied with the Allied monopoly on international power, and is manipulating this process to sow such dissatisfaction broadcast. The idea, I think, is for the Accords to pass the Assembly, for the Security Council to strike them down, and for the world to look at this and say, 'What injustice! Why should something that the world so urgently demands fail to be obtained, just because one _passé_ Western power doesn't approve of it? If that's U.N. law, then down with the U.N.; let us build a new international organisation, which will be genuinely responsive to the concerns of all the world's peoples alike.' And then, with the power of the old Allies broken, this other country will have the field clear to start heaping up international power for herself – perhaps even to create a new global empire."

"Empire?" Sam repeated, startled. "You mean these Accords that everyone's so excited about are a front for some evil mastermind bent on world domination?"

"Well, I shouldn't like to be quoted in the _Times_ ," said Pond, "but – yes, I think so."

* * *

There was a brief silence, which Sam eventually took it upon himself to break. "So which country is it, then?" he said. "I think we kind of missed most of this debate; the only head of state I know who's been moving and shaking in this business is that king in Wakanda."

"Ah, yes, Wakanda," said Pond. "Tell me, Sergeant, what do you know of Wakanda?"

Sam shrugged. "Not much," he admitted.

"Well, you're hardly alone," said Pond. "Few people do know much about Wakanda, even among her nearest neighbours. From time immemorial, she's stood apart from the rest of the Bantu world, wrapping central Lake Turkana and the surrounding countryside in a veil of impenetrable obscurity. Even my ancestors couldn't break her silence when we entered Africa; under the leadership of their sacred warrior chief, the Black Panther, the Wakandans fought the English colonial armies to a standstill – and, since the place was mostly just scrubland and desert anyway, we never bothered with a second foray, but left them to the privacy they so ardently desired." He chuckled, and added whimsically, "The big-game hunters, you know, always did say that the leopard was the greatest challenge of the Big Five."

Sam, whose interest in big-game hunting was tepid at best, had no idea what that meant, but he let it slide. Pond's main line of thought, the implications of which were just beginning to dawn on him, seemed at that moment to be far more interesting.

"But," Pond continued, "there are rumours – nothing concrete or definitive, but having the ring of authenticity about them – that there was, and is, much more to the Land of the Leopard-Folk than a taste for solitude and a totemistic Commander-in-Chief. Some go so far as to say that Wakanda is the last surviving remnant of the ancient Egyptian culture – that, sometime during the Eighteenth Dynasty, a Wakandan slave in Meroe escaped and returned to his homeland, and that the memories he brought with him of Egyptian craft, learning, and religion were mingled with the local traditions and resources to produce a civilisation unlike any other, and dramatically in advance of those about it. Eldorado, Lemuria, Atlantis – the comparisons get a bit overwrought at times, but they can all be distilled to one indisputably sensible reflection: that a people possessed of the wisdom of old Egypt, Earth's sole deposit of native vibranium, and some three thousand years of isolation to develop them both, may be expected, in the natural course of things, to grow into a mighty and formidable nation indeed."

At any other moment, Sam would have been awed by such a concept; in this context, though, its implications were ominous enough to make him shudder. "So you think it's them behind all this?" he said. "They've been biding their time all these centuries, and now they've finally come out to make their move – to make this King T'Chaka of theirs into some kind of global super-pharaoh?"

To his straightforward mind, this notion seemed quite plausible; he was rather startled when Pond blinked in apparent surprise. "The Wakandans?" he said. "Oh, good heavens, no. The Wakandans couldn't possibly be the conspirators you're after; they're far too mysterious and secretive to be any good at that."

Sam took a moment to process this sentence, and then shot an aggrieved look across the table at Steve and the Vision. "He's doing it again," he complained.

"Doing what?" said Pond, sounding honestly bewildered.

"I believe what Sergeant Wilson means," said the Vision, with a hint of amusement in his voice, "is that, to simple souls such as we, being mysterious and secretive appears to be an advantage to a conspirator, not a handicap."

"Oh, in that sense, of course," said Pond. "But only if that which you're conspiring against isn't likewise a mystery to you. Wakanda's traditional isolationism cuts both ways; if it's kept the world from knowing much about Wakanda, it's also kept Wakanda from knowing much about the world. And the party you're looking for – the one who has so deftly manipulated the climate of world opinion to bring about the present crisis – must surely know a very great deal about the world."

Steve nodded. "Fair enough," he said. "So it's not Wakanda, then."

"Well, that depends on what you mean," said Pond. "For my own part, I suspect that Wakanda does play an important role – not as a conspirator, but as… er… well, for lack of a better term, a cat's-paw. That is, I think Miss Romanoff was right that the Wakandan delegation in Lagos was not killed by accident; I daresay that the real conspirator finds it quite advantageous to have a small African nation presented to the world as the victim of an injustice that must be rectified. So many people, who might otherwise be indifferent or even sympathetic to the Avengers, can be reliably galvanised into wild fervour under the influence of that stimulus."

"What stimulus?" said Steve, with a frown.

"White guilt," said Sam promptly, and chuckled at his friend's quizzical expression. "You've got to finish _Modern Times_ , Cap."

Pond shrugged. "Call it what you will," he said. "All I say is that your foe can count on much more sympathy as the champion of a wronged Wakanda than he could expect to have otherwise, and I'm sure he knows it. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he's been feeding T'Chaka talking points through appropriately discreet diplomatic channels – and T'Chaka, in his geopolitical innocence, may not even be aware of it."

The Vision glanced at him. "You keep speaking of 'our foe' and 'the conspirator', Mr. Pond," he said, "but I sense that you have a specific suspect in mind. Is it only the fear of indiscretion that keeps you from naming him? I could use the Mind Stone to keep us from being overheard…"

Pond shook his head. "No, it's not my place to bandy unproved accusations," he said. "I have my notions, of course, but they're based on quite obvious and common facts. There's the Assembly location, I mean, and Mr Rumlow's former affiliations – trivialities, of course, in themselves, but when you add in Wakanda, which is so proudly independent of Western influence and of which fully a third is called Rudolf, it does rather suggest…"

Then he paused abruptly, and reached into his pocket and withdrew a small, black, vibrating device that vaguely resembled a cell phone. He pressed a button on it, frowned at it for a moment, and then arched an eyebrow. "Oh, dear," he murmured. "I'm terribly sorry, gentlemen, but I'm afraid I'll have to beg off unexpectedly. Mr Vision, you and your colleagues will see to that other matter, won't you?"

"Of course, sir," said the Vision.

"Fine," said Pond, and rose. "Good day, then, Sergeant; good day, Captain – and, incidentally, may I extend my condolences on your loss. I knew Peggy Carter slightly – one did, in my line of work – and I don't believe I've ever met a finer woman."

"Thank you, Mr. Pond," said Steve softly.

Pond nodded, and left the table – heading, oddly, not for the door, but toward the restrooms. The Vision gazed after him quizzically, and then turned to the others. "Now, why do you suppose he did that?"

"Probably he didn't want to be noticed when he left," said Steve. "A man leaving from our table attracts attention; a man leaving from the bathroom doesn't, so much. That's probably why he left his umbrella, too." He poked it with his finger. "Lucky for him the rain's eased up, isn't it, Sam?"

"Sure, sure," Sam muttered. The truth was, he'd barely noticed Pond's latest eccentricity, having been thoroughly distracted by the last but one. So Wakanda stood proudly apart from the culture of Europe, and, moreover, every third person there was named Rudolf. Yes, very suggestive indeed. Sam wondered briefly whether Pond stuck in these things to make sure others were listening, or whether it was just some kind of fit that came over him from time to time. Both, maybe.

He shrugged, and forced his mind into another channel. "So what was that other matter he was talking about, Vis?"

"Oh, yes, that," said the Vision. "As you may have gathered, I called upon Mr. Pond last evening and told him of Agent Romanoff's theory about the Accords. Finding him receptive, we discussed various possible measures that might be taken in response, the most immediately practical of which was that we – the Avengers, that is – would be well advised to send a delegate of our own to the meeting in Vienna. Such a person could observe the delegates, and note if any of them betrayed signs of collusion; moreover, if the occasion arose, he could present our own position to the Assembly."

Steve frowned. "Do we have a single position, though?" he said. "The way Rhodey was talking when I left yesterday, it didn't sound like he was anywhere near ready to accept Nat's theory yet."

"No, he hasn't," the Vision conceded. "Nor has Mr. Stark. But I think they would both accept evidence if it were presented to them – which makes it all the more desirable to have someone on the spot keeping his eyes open. And, in any case, it would be a gracious gesture."

"Fair enough," said Steve. "So who do we send? Not Wanda, obviously; that's just asking for trouble…"

"Not Stark or Rhodey, either," Sam added. "Can't trust them to notice evidence for something they'd rather not believe." _And who can blame them?_ he added mentally. _I'm not exactly thrilled with the prospect of a world-hungry mastermind manipulating us, either._

"No," Steve agreed. "And, conversely, it can't be Nat or me; even if we found something, Tony and Rhodey would dismiss it as confirmation-biased. And the same goes for you, Sam; the way Tony's always thought of you as my sidekick, he'd never believe you were impartial."

"Which logic ought to rule me out, as well," said the Vision quietly, "since I truly am Mr. Stark's sidekick – or, at least, an evolution thereof."

Steve took a deep breath. "Right," he said. "So all the currently active Avengers are disqualified. What about Clint? Could we dig him out of retirement to do this job?"

"I should hardly advise sending Agent Barton on a diplomatic mission," said the Vision dryly. "Quite frankly, the ideal candidate would be Prince Thor: a truly independent Avenger, accustomed to associating with dignitaries, whose mere presence would serve to emphasize both the reason for the Avengers' existence and the presumption of a human organization trying to dictate terms to Asgardians. It's a great shame that we can't reach him at the moment."

As Sam silently agreed, a sudden inspiration blazed into his mind. "Well," he said, "we can get the next best thing."

Steve's eyebrows lifted, and Sam saw the idea clicking behind his eyes. "Oh," he said. "You mean… yeah. Yeah, we could do that. Of course, she's not really an Avenger, but…"

"But the symbolic effect's good enough," said Sam. "And she's neutral, like the Vision said about Thor, and internationally respected to boot. Plus, if you're looking for someone to collect evidence for something, why _not_ get a world-class scientist?"

"Logical," the Vision agreed. "Shall I convey the invitation to her, then?"

"Might as well," said Steve, pulling out a phone and punching speed-dial 1. "Just as soon as I've confirmed it with… oh, hey, that you, Tony? Good. There's a proposal we'd like to bounce off you…"


	5. A Stitch in Time

**_VIENNA_**

Prince T'Challa of Wakanda gazed meditatively out the UNOC wall-pane, at the buzz and hum of the great city outside. For great it unquestionably was; he could see that well enough, though none of the white men's cities would ever rival Birnin the Golden in his heart. Before settling down to prepare for the Assembly meeting, he had spent a night and a day inspecting his new surroundings – listening in on rehearsals in the Opera House, examining the artwork in the Albertina (and largely dismissing it, though the famous Hare had succeeded in impressing him), prowling St. Stephen's Cathedral with the wary respect proper to a worshipper of Sekhmet, and, supremely, communing with the spirit of a fellow royal warrior upon the summit of the Kahlenberg. He had even gone so far as to don the Panther skin for the latter visit, deliberately making it at the precise hour when Sobieski's great charge had broken the force of the Turks. (The King, at that same hour, had been touring the Belvedere of Prince Eugene of Savoy – which, to T'Challa's mind, neatly summarized the difference in temper between himself and his royal sire.)

Yes, a great city, certainly – and what was due to transpire there that day would add yet more glory to its name. The Sokovia Accords ratified – a rogue menace to international order subdued – Wakandan honor satisfied in the sight of all the world: Vienna International Center, 9 June 2016. It was well.

The only question was how the Avengers themselves would respond. All seven of them had been conspicuously silent since the Accords had been made public; the so-called Vision had gone so far as to leave the organization's headquarters entirely, and since then had been reported as sighted in nearly a dozen different locations around the world. (T'Challa supposed that he ought to be alarmed at the thought of so powerful a creature being thus left to its own globe-trotting devices – and doubtless he would have been, if he had been able, when thinking of the vibranium pseudo-man, to make room for any emotion other than cold fury at the theft and desecration of Wakanda's most precious resource.) Indeed, their sole comment on the subject had come the previous day, at the very hour that the Black Panther had knelt in the shadow of Jàn Sobieski. A press conference had been held in America at which Iron Man, in the course of a rather rambling speech, had announced that the Avengers had the fullest possible respect for the principles of law and national sovereignty, and that, to show their support for the noble concern for these ideals that the Accords represented, they would be sending an emissary of their own to represent them at the Assembly deliberations. (He had appeared to want to say more, but then had glanced over his shoulder, met the Black Widow's gaze, and abruptly concluded with, "Peace in the valley, folks. Thanks for coming.")

Which was well enough, but T'Challa felt some private trepidation over the matter; he had vowed to his father not to disgrace the House of Bashenga today with any display of what the West considered savagery (and he considered ordinary concern for one's honor as a man), but several of the Avengers, if they were to appear in the U.N.C. foyer that day, would sorely test his resolution on that point. Iron Man himself, for instance, who was known to have had dealings with the jackal Klaw – or, for that matter, his lackey War Machine, who evidently had no special powers at all beyond what Iron Man had given him. And even Captain America… it was true that the Moon of N'jare had been fairly lost in the Northern Excursions, and that the Allies had as fairly wrested it from its Italian rediscoverers, but T'Challa could not persuade himself that that gave them, or anyone else, the right to blazon it with an alien people's colors.

Still, whoever the delegate proved to be, it would fall to T'Challa to greet him with all cordiality – and more likely sooner than later, as the opening of the session was now less than an hour away. With an inward sigh, the young prince began to plan his approach, beginning (for one could always hope) with the Avengers least offensive to him as the assumed liaison. _I suppose neither of us is used to the spotlight,_ he might say to the Black Widow; to the Falcon, a more direct salute of a fellow warrior would be called for – something, perhaps, along the lines of…

" _Heiliger Strohsack!_ "

"Is that who I think it is?"

" _Qu'est-ce qui l'y amène, la Psyché moderne?_ "

T'Challa blinked, and turned his head – first to the whispering delegates, and then to the doorway toward which their wide-eyed attention seemed to be uniformly directed. And then his eyes, too, widened – for entering the conference hall, a wide if somewhat nervous smile pasted on her face, was the unmistakable figure of celestial voyager, godly consort-designate, and perennial Nobel-Prize candidate Jane Foster. Someone seemed to have groomed her well for the occasion, for her well-known tendency to absent-minded disarray was nowhere in evidence; she walked with poise and determination, her eyes flitting hither and yon to take in every detail of the assembly, and her French-braided hair and modest olive-green dress were arranged with studiously understated elegance – the better, perhaps, to heighten the effect of the striking red-and-gold brooch, in the shape of the hammer Mjöllnir, that was pinned conspicuously above her left breast.

T'Challa's eyes widened as he grasped the artistry of this unexpected twist. _Well played, indeed, Avengers,_ he thought. _The world rebukes you, and you reply with a display of power from beyond the world. A cunning stroke – but it can be parried, if one keeps his wits about him._

And he glided forward to intercept the fair sky-bride, with the idea of asking her point-blank whether Asgard was contemplating U.N. membership. But Foster was too quick for him; having caught sight of the King, she courteously detached herself from the Assembly president (a tall, genial, and somewhat fatuous Dutchman, whose pride in getting to oversee history was almost painfully evident in his every gesture) and curveted around the partition to where the majesty of Wakanda sat chatting amiably with a delegate from Sierra Leone.

The King, seeing her approach, broke off and rose to his full height (such as it was) to greet her. "Miss Foster," he said. "This is an unexpected honor."

Foster inclined her head briefly. "Your Majesty," she said, "on behalf of the Avengers, I would like to extend my condolences for your nation's recent loss."

A shadow passed over the King's face. "Thank you, Miss Foster," he said. "It is good to know that the Avengers regret what was done that day – though of course their regret cannot restore what was taken from us."

There was a moment's flash of empathetic anguish in Foster's eyes; the next moment, though, it was replaced by a look of stern resolution. "No, it can't," she said. "No more than the Accords can. But that doesn't keep either of them from being worthwhile."

"Then the Avengers agree that the Accords are worthwhile?" said the King, quick as a serval pouncing on a lizard.

But Foster, it seemed, had not dealt with Loki Silvertongue without picking up a finesse or two. "They agree," she said, "that, when something's wrong, it ought to be made right. If the Accords can do that, then they're worthwhile."

"Ah," said the King, and let the syllable hang in the air. Foster waited not quite two seconds, and then made a small half-curtsy and turned to greet the other dignitaries. As she did so, her gaze briefly met T'Challa's, standing on the bottom step below her; a look of expectant inquiry gleamed in her eye, and the Prince knew that she was challenging him to say what the King had left unspoken.

* * *

He hesitated only an instant. Diplomacy was all very well, but a man had his pride; he was scalded if he would let it be claimed that T'Challa of Wakanda had been intimidated by a mere scientist. If she wished to hear what he wished to say, then so it should be; it could do Wakanda no harm, and perhaps it would do Jane Foster a bit of good, to hear how the world regarded her storm-flinging beau and his friends from work.

So, as she descended the steps, and he moved aside to let her pass, he murmured, just loudly enough for her to hear, "And what would _they_ propose, Miss Foster?"

She glanced back at him over her shoulder and arched an eyebrow. "They?"

"The Avengers," said T'Challa, sliding himself in behind her. "To make things right, instead of the Accords."

"Why, what's wrong with the Accords?" said Foster, without breaking her stride.

"I couldn't say," said T'Challa, effortlessly lengthening his own to place himself beside her. "To me, it seems only right that those who imperil the world should be broken to its reins. But I rather doubt that the perils themselves agree."

His shaft went home; Foster, though clearly striving for full self-possession, failed to prevent a flash of outraged pique from crossing her face. Her voice, however, remained calm. "No, I suppose not," she said. "But the question is, who really imperils the world? The ones with powers, or the ones –" and she cast a meaningful glance back at the assembled delegates "– with power?"

T'Challa curled his lip; he had heard this sort of talk before, from M'Baku the Man-Ape and his primitivists in the west, and nothing heated his blood more quickly. "Authority is not a peril, Miss Foster," he said. "It is a necessity of our race. Men must live together, and their disputes must be settled; if you will not have them settled by custom and the judgment of the wise, they will be settled by force and terror. That is why we of Wakanda support the Accords: we do not want the whims of a chaos-sowing sorceress to be stronger than the traditions of civilization."

In his voice was the fervor of a thousand kings who, upon inheriting a land devoid of natural borders, split in two by the Great Water, and possessed of a treasure that stronger peoples would readily have raped their own totems to control, had devoted every ounce of their strength and wit to keeping the Wakandan nation secure, unified, and free – and, by the blessing of the Stranger Gods, had succeeded for over three thousand years. And Foster heard it; he could tell by the heaviness of her sigh, and the gentle sympathy – or was it pity? – in her eyes as they met his own. "I can't disagree with that, Your Highness," she said. "I just hope that the traditions of civilization are what the Accords are really protecting."

T'Challa frowned. "What else?"

But Foster only smiled, and shook her head. "You're too good for this world, Your Highness," she said. "Just like another prince I know."

And, while T'Challa paused to sort the mild rebuke from the (from Jane Foster) sublime praise, a speaker above his head whistled to life, and six voices said in six different languages, _"Everyone will please be seated. This Assembly is now in session."_

Foster seemed annoyed at the interruption, but gave T'Challa the same gracious half-curtsy as his father, and went to take the seat that the Assembly had reserved for the Avengers' representative. T'Challa himself moved to stand by the far end of the glass wall, as he and the King had arranged beforehand; as he took up his position, he glanced back at the petite Westerner settling herself into the observers' row, and wondered just what was taking place within that much-acclaimed mind.

 _What the Accords are really protecting…_ was it a warning? Were the Avengers planning, somehow, to use their upcoming status as United-Nations operatives to their own advantage? That could be possible, of course – but, then again, it was also possible that they had no such plans, but that Foster wished him to _believe_ that they did, so that…

He caught himself, and firmly severed this line of thought. This was why he hated diplomacy: you had to think every moment with all the subtlety of a master strategist, yet nothing ever seemed to come to an issue – and nine times out of ten you turned out to be merely chasing phantoms, anyway. For how subtle, after all, could the motivations in this case be? The Maximoff woman had willfully sacrificed Wakandan and Nigerian lives for the sake of her own victory; naturally, the nations of the world could not permit such deeds to become common, and those of them that grasped this had joined together to restrain her and her fellows. Let the Foster woman talk as much anarchism about that as she liked (though why the bride-to-be of a celestial prince should despise dominion, he couldn't conceive); nonetheless, so it was, and so it was well for it to be.

* * *

And now the King had approached the podium, and laid down the text of his speech. It was a speech that he had doted and sweat over, devoting his every spare moment that week to reinforcing its arguments and polishing its rhetorical jewels. It was the speech that was to prove to the world that Wakanda was a humane and gracious nation, and to Wakanda that her King was indeed an oratorical match for that honey-tongued savage, M'Baku. In short, it was the speech upon which King T'Chaka of Wakanda had staked all his hopes in the new age that he believed to be dawning.

"Mr. President," he began. "Your Excellencies – ladies and gentlemen – peoples of the world. It is with great…"

And those four words were all of the speech that the United Nations, or anyone else who hadn't shared a hotel room with the King that week, were ever to hear. For at that moment, without hint or warning, all sound in the Vienna International Center was swallowed up in the fearsome howl of a celestial dynamo, and the glass wall behind the King blazed all the colors of the rainbow as a torrent of otherworldly light poured itself down upon the unsuspecting Wagramerstrasse.

The polychromatic radiance struck T'Challa full in the face, and he reeled back from the wall, momentarily blinded by its glare. This, however, was more the result of its unexpectedness than its brilliance; when, having blinked the floaters from his eyes, he turned again toward the coruscant pillar, he found it to be no brighter than the ordinary noonday light of the tropical desert he called home. Ashamed of his momentary weakness, he defiantly fixed his eyes upon it and stared unblinkingly – only to have it vanish the next instant as swiftly as it had come, leaving no sign of its passing except an immense black rune charred into the curb and the conspicuous absence of the news van that had been parked there.

A moment later, and all the delegates and observers were clustering about the wall, gesticulating wildly at the fused concrete and vociferating in an angry babel of languages. Only three people present, apart from T'Challa himself, stood apart from the general uproar: the King, who had half-turned in the podium and stood as though frozen; Foster, who was staring at the glass in quizzical bewilderment from her seat in the observers' row; and the Assembly president, who slowly walked over to that seat and glared down at her from his full 187-centimeter height. "Dr. Foster," he said, his soft voice poorly concealing the wrath of his wounded pride, "was that what I believe it to have been?"

Foster nodded, her eyes still fixed on the glass. "Oh, yes," she said.

"May one ask," said the president, "what it was doing _here_ , of all places, and on this of all occasions?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," said Foster, and rose abruptly to her feet. "But I'm just curious enough to go find out. If you'll excuse me…?"

She threw her purse over her shoulder and strode from the chamber, a woman on a mission. A few minutes later, she appeared on the cobblestones below; ignoring the exclamations of the surrounding crowd, she stepped into the center of the sigil and raised her eyes to the sky, her arms akimbo. "Heimdall!" she called, clearly enough for T'Challa to read her lips without effort. "Lower the Bifrost! Again!"

There was a moment's pause; then the Rainbow Bridge descended anew, engulfing the petite physicist in a ten-second maelstrom of spectral energy. When it cleared, the curb was bare once more; Jane Foster, as was her wont, had vanished from the face of the Earth.

* * *

The assembled delegates stood expectantly by the glass for a few more minutes; then, when Foster failed to return immediately from whatever celestial colloquy she had departed for, they began to drift back to their seats by twos and threes, murmuring among themselves about the wonder they had witnessed. As they did so, life seemed to return to the King's frame; he turned to face the glass wall head-on, and T'Challa saw in his eyes the bewildered sorrow of a child whose father has left him for the battlefield.

He stepped forward, and laid his hand on his sire's arm. "I'm sorry, Father," he said in the New Tongue. "It would have been a fine speech; they ought not to have taken it from you."

The King shook his head. "It is nothing, my son," he said. "All things fulfill the purposes of the gods, and we who are but men must submit."

Yet there was pain in his tone – as well there might be, when a man had suffered so much. Twenty years before, when the King had been crowned in Zana, the high priest N'Baza had foretold that his reign would be strong and tranquil, worthy of his ancestors; instead, it had seen Wakanda's borders violated for the first time in over a millennium, the secret of her vibranium revealed to the world, and the unveiling into which she was thereby forced turned into a cruel and senseless tragedy in its own right – and now, as the crowning insult, fate had seen fit to deprive him even of the oration that might have salvaged some last scrap of his pride. It was at such moments that T'Challa most admired and least comprehended his father: had such befallen himself, he would certainly not have confined himself to remarking that such was the lot of man.

"Perhaps Miss Foster, who now walks among the gods, will reveal those purposes to us when she returns," the King continued, somewhat wistfully. "We can only wait and see."

T'Challa stifled a growl. He hated waiting.


	6. An Honorable Livery

_**ASGARD**_

As she materialized onto the platform, Jane made an effort to will her face into an expression of stern regality, rather than the giddy exhilaration that traveling on the Bifrost always made her feel. After all, she could hardly expect Heimdall to show her the proper respect if he saw her grinning like a schoolgirl just because he'd given her a ride on his Einstein-Rosen bridge. (Well, actually she could, since she was still his prince's betrothed, and that was what mattered to the Asgardian sentinel – but Jane came from a world where authority had for generations gone to whoever could feign the greatest gravity, and it still weighed with her more than she always liked to admit.)

When she got her first clear glimpse of Himinbjörg, however, she forgot all about choosing between glaring and grinning, and simply stood staring with her jaw hanging open. She had expected, of course, to find the missing news van the delegates had been talking about – but she certainly hadn't expected it to have been reduced to a fused mass of torn and smoking steel in the few minutes it had taken her to get out onto the street. Even the Warriors Three weren't usually _that_ exuberant.

After a few moments' speechless gaping, she somehow managed to locate her voice, and turned on her heel to face the Bifrost's guardian. "Heimdall, I don't even know what to say," she said. "I mean, what on Ear… what in the Nine Realms did the Austrian news media ever do to you?"

Heimdall's lip quirked momentarily – the closest he ever came to a smile. "I bear no grudge against your world's chatterers, Lady Jane," he said. "They are petty creatures, glutted with the milk of Ratatösk, but they do not menace Asgard. It is the thief of this vessel, not its owners, whose manners I object to."

Jane blinked. "Thief?"

"Some twenty minutes before," said Heimdall. "A man of double face placed a tool of fiery death within, then overrode the vessel's commands and brought it to the Center. When he prepared to flee and summon the fire from a distance, I chose to remove him and it from your vicinity."

It took Jane a few seconds to interpret this. "You mean… there was a _bomb_ in the truck?"

Heimdall nodded.

"And it detonated on its way to Asgard?"

"The radiance of the Bifrost is of intensest might," said Heimdall. "Perhaps I ought not to have been so careless with it."

After a pause, he added, "Perhaps I wasn't."

Jane suppressed a shudder; the protection of Asgard was an unnerving thing to have, sometimes. "Um… okay, then," she said. "So where is this thief now?"

"In Nástrond, beyond doubt," said Heimdall. "But his body is there." And he pointed to the remains of the van's cockpit.

Jane licked her lips and took a deep breath; then, screwing up her courage, she stepped forward and looked inside. She knew what she could expect to see: a charred, skeletal piece of human debris, of the sort that the wonders of modern progress had made so familiar to the people of Midgard, but with the extra layer of ghastliness that horrors always had when seen in person rather than on the nightly news. It was hardly the sort of sight she had been craving when she'd woken up that morning, but she was a princess of Asgard – de-facto, anyway; it didn't become her to quail from the sight of carnage.

Such resolution, however, didn't keep her from covering her mouth and letting out an involuntary squeal of horror when she actually saw the thing behind the wheel. Fate had contrived a macabre twist that even a 21st-Century Midgardian could hardly have anticipated: instead of being merely seared off his skull, the man's face seemed to have partially _melted_ , forming a grotesquely distorted parody of the human countenance such as Jane had never seen outside of a nightmare or a modern-art exhibit.

For a moment, horrid fancies out of old folk-tales flitted through her brain; then her reason reasserted itself, and she realized what she was seeing. Flesh didn't melt at high heat, but there were plenty of artificial polymers that did; obviously, the man had been wearing a mask of some kind – which was, no doubt, what Heimdall had really meant by calling him "of double face". Indeed, when she forced herself to look at the body a second time, she found herself almost recognizing the features he had assumed; some dim memory of a historical documentary nagged at her mind – or had it been a museum display?

She turned to Heimdall. "Do you mind if I take this mask back with me to Midgard?" she said. "I think the authorities in Vienna would be interested to study it."

As Heimdall made no move to discourage her, she turned back, stepped gingerly into the van, and (ignoring the queasy fluttering in the pit of her stomach) carefully peeled the half-melted disguise off the charred head beneath. With it came a good deal of crisply brittle skin and hair; that was just as well, of course, allowing as it would for DNA identification of the perpetrator, but it didn't help her digestion any.

Holding the mask at arm's length between her thumbs and forefingers, she stepped out of the van and raised her eyes to meet Heimdall's. "All right," she said. "I guess I'll be heading back now, then."

Heimdall nodded.

"Thank you, by the way," Jane added. "I guess quite a few people down there owe you their lives; I can't promise that they'll be grateful, but, anyway, I am."

But that seemed to be the wrong thing to say; it was hard to tell, with him, but she thought that Heimdall stiffened. "No, Lady Jane," he said. "I am but a servant of the House of Bor; to keep you from harm is my plain duty, and nothing more. It is not meet that it should put you in my debt."

 _Right, of course,_ Jane thought. _Stop thinking like an American, Foster._

With a feeling of wistful regret for the tradition of liberty that he couldn't share, she turned and strode back toward the Bifrost platform. As she positioned herself on the proper spot for her return, however, she heard the Sentinel behind her speak her name, and stifled a sigh as she turned to face him. "Yes, Heimdall?"

Heimdall's face was as impassive as ever, but there was something in his eyes that Jane almost wanted to call merriment. "Your ornament is admirable," he said.

Jane's hand stole to the brooch on her bosom, and she blushed and smiled in spite of herself. "Oh," she said. "Well… thank you. I mean… yes, thank you."

"Not at all, My Lady."

* * *

" _Heimdall_ complimented you on the brooch?" Darcy's voice was at once disbelieving and ecstatic. "Ee-yes! Touchdown!"

Jane laughed. "Let me know when you and Agent Romanoff get together to pour Gatorade on each other," she said. "But anyway, the point is that, yes, I'm fine, and so is everyone else here, so you and Eric can stop panicking."

"What about the perp?"

Jane shrugged – pointlessly, of course, since Darcy couldn't see her. "I told the police the story when I got back," she said, "and gave them the mask to examine, so I assume the answers about him are on their way. Anyway, even if there is some sinister conspiracy behind him, I don't think there's any chance of it trying again within the next hour – not now that it knows what it's up against. So really, don't worry about me."

She took a deep breath. "And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go make a speech."

There was a few moments' silence from the other end of the phone, and then – " _You?_ "

Nettled, Jane pursed her lips and snapped the phone shut without replying. Really, she wasn't _that_ awkward in front of large crowds – or not most of the time, anyway. There had been that one time in the eighth grade… but that had just caught her at a bad moment. This time, she'd do just fine.

After all, this time she really had something to say. It had been slowly maturing within her ever since Heimdall's little send-off, and, by the time Darcy's call had come through, she had determined that the Assembly needed to hear it – and quickly, before they recovered from the shock of Heimdall's intervention and went ahead with this rigged little vote of theirs. And she was the person to tell them, if anyone was.

Of course, it would mean saying a permanent goodbye to all those Nobel fantasies of hers. Her recurring appearances on tabloid covers were bad enough; throw in a universally publicized intervention in world politics – and on what the Swedish Academy was sure to consider The Wrong Side – and she would be irreversibly branded as the kind of self-aggrandizing Celebrity Scientist whom no amount of legitimate pioneership could persuade Stockholm to take seriously. But that (she told herself firmly) didn't matter, any more than did all the keynote symposium addresses she had lost through the arrangers' fears of seeming sensationalistic. Let the world think what it chose about her; it didn't make her regret either her vocation to physics or her love for Thor – and neither would it make her regret what she was about to do.

Holding her head high, like the princess she was, she strode the remaining length of the hallway and re-entered the Assembly chamber.

* * *

The Assembly president shot forward at her appearance like a trap-door spider lunging at a cricket. "Well, Dr. Foster?" he said. "Can you tell us what was meant by…"

Jane glided past him without breaking stride; if she turned aside or slowed down now, she couldn't trust herself ever to make it to the podium. It was right in front of her, just a few steps away; all she had to do was keep her eyes on it, keep moving forward, keep putting one foot in front of the other until she was…

There. She was there. She took a deep breath, grasped the edges of the podium, and raised her head to gaze out upon the sea – such as it was – of faces before her. "Mr. President," she began, remembering how King T'Chaka had begun his address. "Your Excellencies – ladies and gentlemen – peoples…" (Dared she? Sure, why not.) "…of Midgard." (Okay, a couple chuckles, good – though she wished Prince T'Challa would stop glaring daggers at her.)

"I've just spoken with the Sentinel of the Bifrost," she said, "and it seems that what you saw just now was not an arbitrary display of power, but a deliberate intervention to prevent a great tragedy. Apparently the van that was transported had been hijacked by some sort of terrorist, and rigged with a bomb powerful enough to take out this whole section of the International Center… No, please, ladies and gentlemen, there's nothing to worry about," she said, raising her voice to be heard over the sudden hubbub. "Neither the bomb nor the perpetrator is a problem any longer, and the Bundespolizei are acting on evidence received to hunt down any possible collaborators as we speak. Beyond that, I'm afraid I can't tell you any more.

"What I can tell you, though," she continued, wishing her heartbeat would slow down, "is why the Sentinel chose to intervene. Because you've all assembled here today to decide how much intervention should be allowed to what you call 'enhanced persons', and the person who just saved you is very enhanced indeed." (She thought irresistibly of the eighth chapter of the Gylfaginning, which attributed to Heimdall Hallinskithi the power to hear the wool growing on a sheep's back; whatever "inordinately beyond the human standard" was legally supposed to mean, she didn't think much of it if it didn't include that.) "So it seems to me that his reason just might matter to you.

"Of course, in one sense, you've probably already guessed the reason – and you're right. It was me. Heimdall dropped the Bifrost because his prince's betrothed was in danger; if I hadn't been here today, this window behind me wouldn't be here anymore, either. But that's not the kind of reason I'm talking about. Here's a man who has power at his fingertips beyond anything our Realm can imagine, and the opportunity to do almost anything with it that he chooses – and what he chooses to do is look after the well-being of some mortal girl from Cincinnati. Why?

"If you ask him, he'll say it's his duty; he's a vassal of the House of Bor, and I'm one of its important people, and that's just the way it is. That's what he said to me just now – and I won't lie to you, I didn't think much of it. I didn't see what sense it made to exalt one person over another just for the sake of some ancient tradition; that's something they don't exactly teach us mortal girls from Cincinnati to approve of, you know."

She fingered her brooch again, and smiled quietly to herself as she continued: "But then, as I was leaving, he showed me – I won't bore you with how – that I'd been jumping to conclusions a little too quickly. I'd thought that his sense of fealty forced him to think of himself as less than I was: less free, less honorable, less of a person in general. But he didn't, and he showed me that clearly. He had at least as much self-respect as I did, and probably more than any Midgardian I'd ever known – but he was still obliged to respect me more.

"And you know how he manages that?" she demanded of the assembled nations. "You know what the secret is that lets him combine dignity and subservience that way? Because I think I do, now. The secret is that his obligation to honor me is an obligation he's put on _himself_ – that his world gives him a way to submit to its rulers of his own free will. He didn't just receive an order; he swore an oath. The House of Bor didn't crack his skull; it won his heart. Because, in the long run, that's the only real kind of authority that one man can have over another."

She took a deep breath, put all images of Carl XVI Gustaf out of her mind, and plunged into the home stretch. "Now, this Assembly is here to vote on making the Avengers subject to the U.N., and I'm here to represent the Avengers in that discussion. I'm not an Avenger myself, of course, but, so long as I'm in this building, I might as well be. And, on behalf of the Avengers, I'd just like to ask all of you here: What do you want us to do? Protect you? We're doing that already. Obey you? Why, if you don't trust us to obey the countries' laws that produced you? Fear you? Look out the window again and tell me if you can ever make us do that.

"No, if the Sokovia Accords mean anything, it must be that you're asking us to _embrace_ you – that you want Captain America to be your man the same way that Heimdall is Odin's. Maybe that's a good thing to want, maybe it isn't; nobody asked my opinion, so I won't give it. But it's not an opinion, it's a simple fact, that you're not going to get it just by telling us to give it to you. Ratify all the Accords you like, make speeches till you're blue in the face, even send out the Peacekeepers if it makes you happy: none of it's going to get you a step closer to the real dream. You're looking for fealty, not just obedience, and fealty can only come from free men. So when the World's Mightiest Heroes come before you on their own two feet, and freely confess that your will is their law, then you can go ahead and congratulate yourself on having made a better world for humanity – and, as I say, maybe you will have. But, until then, for your sake and the world's, don't settle for anything less.

"And that's all I have to say, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for being patient with me while I said it."

* * *

On legs that seemed to be filled with jelly, Jane stepped down from the podium, her head spinning at the sheer enormity of what she'd just done. By the fifth or sixth paragraph, she had been running on sheer adrenalin, and somehow it had seen her through; now that it was over, however, the rush had faded away, and a sense of miserable smallness and inadequacy swept over her. Who in the Nine Realms had she been thinking, all this time, that she was? What kind of crazy person was it who got up on a whim in front of the U.N. General Assembly – she, a perfect laywoman with no more right to address them than the janitor would have – and proceeded, without notes or preparation of any kind, to berate them for being insufficiently feudalistic? Forget the Nobel Prize; how could she expect to show her face in public again after…

…wait a minute; was that _applause_?

She jerked her head upward, and looked back out upon the assembled company – and then her intellect seemed to reel on the brink as she processed what she was seeing. For there, in the front row, on his feet and clapping with solemn yet vigorous fervor, was His Most August Majesty, King T'Chaka of Wakanda.

As she slowly assimilated this phenomenon into her mental model of the world, the delegate from Austria leaped to his own feet, for all the world as though he were accepting T'Chaka's permission to do so, and joined in the applause. A flurry of other delegates around the room followed his lead, and social momentum did the rest; within thirty seconds, a hotly blushing Jane was receiving a unanimous standing ovation from 58.2 percent of the United Nations. Even Prince T'Challa was clapping – stiffly, mechanically, and plainly out of filial reverence alone, but clapping nonetheless.

She managed a feeble curtsy, and then hurried away from the podium – nearly colliding, in the process, with the delegate from Kyrgyzstan, who strode forward and made a few energetic remarks of which, since they were delivered in Russian, Jane understood not a word. (She later found that the delegate had, in fact, moved the adjournment of the meeting in view of the various unforeseen developments; also, that this motion had been carried, and that the Assembly would reconvene at the New York headquarters in two days' time "to further consider its recommendation to the Security Council regarding the so-called Sokovia Accords".) Nor would she, in any case, have had much attention to spare, for no sooner had she made it down the steps than T'Chaka had come forward and placed a hand on her arm.

"Miss Foster," he said quietly, "may I speak with you privately?"

* * *

Jane was more than happy to oblige. She had felt all along that she hadn't probed the Wakandans quite as gracefully or thoroughly as Agent Romanoff had wanted her to do – partly because she wasn't nearly as smooth as Agent Romanoff, and partly because she'd gotten to the International Center rather later than she'd meant to. (Being an old-fashioned sort who felt that God had never meant telephones to be used as timepieces, she had been relying throughout the morning on the wristwatch that she kept set to Greenwich time, and it wasn't until an hour or so before the meeting that she'd realized that Greenwich and Vienna weren't in the same time zone.) An opportunity to have another crack at the problem was welcome.

So she and T'Chaka stole out in the hallway (with T'Challa, disapproving but loyal as ever, at their heels), and he led her to a small conference room about five doors down. It was near enough to the Assembly chamber that she could still hear the deliberations, but she couldn't make out what anyone was saying, or even whether or not it was in English. It was just a muted, irrelevant backdrop – as, perhaps, formal public debates generally are to those who confer with kings.

Having offered her a chair (which she accepted gratefully), T'Chaka laced his hands over his stomach and took a deep breath. "So, Miss Foster," he said, "I imagine you were rather surprised by my reaction to your address just now."

"A little bit, yes," said Jane. "Though, now that I think about it, maybe I shouldn't have been. I suppose a king is more likely to approve of what I said than most other people would be."

T'Chaka nodded. "Yes, that is part of it," he said. "But there is another part, as well. I am a god-fearing man, Miss Foster: all my life, I have striven to perform the observances suitable to my station, and to keep myself clean of defilement."

To Jane, whose knowledge of Wakandan religion was nil, this meant precious little; still, it seemed an admirable enough aspiration, and she was about to say as much when he continued. "My son will tell you," he said with a sly glance at Prince T'Challa, "that I have gotten little good out of all this piety – and perhaps he is right. But I do not regret it, Miss Foster. To me, it is not for one's own benefit that one serves the gods, but out of gratitude that one is permitted to exist at all. You understand?" he said earnestly. "This is a good world, Miss Foster, a beautiful world, for all its sorrows and evils; it is not right for us to live in it without honoring its masters."

 _We know Him by His most wise and excellent contrivances… we reverence and adore Him on account of His dominion…_ "Yes, Your Majesty," said Jane with a smile. "I understand that very well."

"So," said T'Chaka. "And if this is so when the gods merely allow one to live, how much more so when a god has actually saved one from death? For I believe, Miss Foster, that I would not be living now if the god you call Heimdall had not reached down from the sky – and so I must honor him, though he is not a god of my people."

A shiver ran down Jane's spine; she thought she saw where this was leading. "But Heimdall's only a servant in Asgard," she said, "and I'm a part of its royalty. So if you honor him, you have to honor me that much more. And that's why you gave me that ovation, back in the Assembly chamber?"

"As I say, it was not the only reason," said T'Chaka. "I hope I should applaud any Westerner who spoke in defense of fealty; such a thing is rare to hear, and always worthy of encouragement. But when the Westerner is the bride of a ruling god, among a realm of gods to which I owe my life – then, yes, it is my special duty to praise."

And there it was: the second chance that Jane had been hoping for, just dropped into her lap. Not that she was entirely comfortable with T'Chaka's reasoning; it was all very well for post-modern Westerners to refer flippantly to the Asgardians as "gods", but to have someone take that literally was another matter… but, then again, would the logic have been any worse if Heimdall had been some other mighty benefactor? ( _Probably,_ whispered her gut – but, with the key to a global conspiracy potentially at her fingertips, she wasn't going to stop to parse the distinction.)

"Well, then," she said, taking a deep breath, "if you think that much of me, would you answer me if I asked what might be a slightly ticklish question? You know us scientists, always wanting to know everything about everything."

T'Chaka hesitated. "You understand, Miss Foster, that I am still Wakanda's king," he said. "However indebted I am to you and your gods, I may not discharge that debt at the expense of my people. But, with that qualification, yes, I agree that you have a right to know what I can tell you."

Jane nodded. "Okay, that's fair," she said. "Here's the question, then. When Wanda Maximoff flung Crossbones into that hotel, you didn't react right away; I think it was about a week before anyone in America even knew there were Wakandans in the Bashe – and of course you only came out in support of the Accords when they were made public a few days ago." She took a deep breath. "Would it be accurate, Your Majesty, to infer that you were consulting with the leaders of other nations before you settled on a course of action?"

"It would," said T'Chaka gravely.

"And was there any one nation in particular that urged the course you took?"

"There was."

"Which one?"

But it wasn't T'Chaka who answered; instead, T'Challa, as though unwilling to let this conversation reach its end without some form of protest, broke into speech for the first and only time during the whole conference. "A trustworthy nation, Miss Foster," he said. "A nation that respects our sovereign solitude; a nation whose ruler, despite his sufferings, has always been a friend to Wakanda. A nation – strange as it may seem, among Western powers – that understands the meaning of honor."

"I daresay," Jane replied coolly. "So does this nation have a name?"

T'Chaka made a small but imperious gesture; his son relapsed into brooding silence, and he resumed speaking as though no interruption had been made. "The proposal to restrain the Avengers by means of the United Nations," he said, "was presented to us by the Honorable Dietrich Gorzenko, ambassador to our country from the Republic of Latveria. It was, he said, the personal suggestion of his head of state, Latverian President Victor Von Doom."

Jane smiled in quiet triumph. "Thank you, Your Majesty."


	7. Sheep's Clothing

_**JARVIS ISLAND  
**_ _(mainframe location)_

"Latveria," murmured ACS-9786-02 ["Captain America/Steve R."], frowning down at the Facility library's oversized globe. "Latveria… Latveria… there are too many countries in Europe nowadays, you know that?"

ACS-9786-04 ["Black Widow/Natasha R."] sighed, walked over to the globe, and pointed. "It's this one, Steve," she said. "See that little green wedge on the Baltic, between Poland and Lithuania?"

ACS-9786-02 frowned. "That's not East Prussia?"

"Not anymore," said ACS-9786-04. "Or not officially, anyway. You see, when the Allies met at Potsdam to decide the postwar fate of Germany, Stalin took the traditional territory of East Prussia, made the southern half part of Poland, and turned the northern half into a non-contiguous province of the Russian S.F.S.R. It was part of his general plan to bring the whole eastern half of Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence – and, with Churchill removed from office while the Postdam Conference was ongoing, the rest of the Allies were putty in his hands." She raised her hand as ACS-9786-02 opened his mouth. "Don't misunderstand me, Steve. I'm saying nothing against your hero Roosevelt, or Truman either; I'm sure they were great men in their own sphere – though I do wonder, sometimes, whether they were so much greater than the average G.I. on the Western Front. But even the best friend of your… oh, all right, of _our_ country can't claim that Americans have the gift of shrewd and cunning statecraft. Brave, noble, resourceful – all that, yes. Foxy, no."

ACS-9786-08 ["Falcon/Sam W."] nodded. "Yeah, our foxiness average definitely went up when you emigrated, Nat," he said. "I'll never argue with that one."

ACS-9786-04 turned and looked silently at him for 2.083 seconds, and then turned back to ACS-9786-02. "Anyway, the takeover happened," she said. "The maps were redrawn, several million Germans were forcibly relocated and replaced with Russians, and Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad. For almost half a century, this little sliver of land was a key Soviet port area and one of the odder details on Soviet maps; then came John Paul II and Reagan and Wałęsa, and suddenly nothing was Soviet anymore."

"Uh-huh," said ACS-9786-02. "So it went and became German again?"

"Well, not automatically," said ACS-9786-04. "Kaliningrad was still a valuable port, after all; in fact, with Tallinn and Riga gone, it was probably more valuable to Moscow than it ever had been before. So the Kremlin made a valiant effort to retain it – and probably they would have succeeded, had it not been for a former West German diplomat named Victor Doom."

ACS-9786-02 nodded. "Right, Doom," he said. "Tell me about him."

ACS-9786-04 rolled her eyes. "You make it sound so simple, Steve," she said. "The most incorrigibly enigmatic world leader since the Forbidden City went out of business: right, tell you about him."

"I wouldn't have thought any world leader was much of an enigma to you, Nat," said ACS-9786-10 ["Wanda M./Scarlet Witch"].

ACS-9786-04 sighed. "I may be good, Wanda, but I'm not a magician," she said. "And that's what it seems to take to find out about Doom's formative years. All that's generally agreed is that he was born about 1954 in a gypsy colony in Lower Saxony; that he attended the University of Tübingen, where he dazzled his teachers with his natural aptitude for everything from poli-sci to physics; and that he went into the West German diplomatic service right out of college, rose like a rocket for about four years, and then suddenly fell out of favor with his superiors for reasons that even my kind of sources can't seem to clarify. There's almost something Lovecraftian about the whole thing: it's as though he found a copy of the Necronomicon in one of the libraries in Bonn, and got inspired to perform unspeakable investigations into the hidden and unclean powers of the universe."

"A copy of the what?" said ACS-9786-02.

"Nothing," said ACS-9786-04. "Never mind. The point is that Doom fell under some sort of cloud in 1979, which those in the know refuse to talk about, but which was enough to get him effectively removed from the diplomatic service. Not actually removed – they seem to have been somewhat afraid to actually fire him – but exiled to an essentially honorary embassy post thousands of miles away and effectively cut off from the rest of the world." She smirked. "Three guesses where _that_ was."

ACS-9786-02 raised an eyebrow. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you meant Wakanda," he said. "But that's not possible, is it? Wakanda was deliberately isolated from outside influence until just a couple years ago; they couldn't have had any embassies in 1979."

"Not in the traditional sense, no," said ACS-9786-04. "But there were a handful of countries with which the Wakandans engaged in a unique kind of arm's-length diplomacy for decades before the Klaw affair. What they did was to build these immense pleasure barges, set them afloat near the center of Lake Turkana, and offer selected foreign representatives room, board, and modest luxury for so long as they cared to live on them. They would never actually set foot on Wakandan soil, but they would be in regular contact with the king and his ministers, and the attendants on the barges – all of whom were of at least one-eighth royal blood – would provide them with a window into the Wakandan society. And vice versa, of course," she added with a wink. "That was probably the real point of the arrangement; it's not widely known, but the new Wakandan intelligence service is made up almost entirely of these former barge attendants."

"A-ha," said ACS-9786-02. "And Germany – excuse me, _West_ Germany – was one of these?"

"She was," said ACS-9786-04. "So was East Germany, for that matter. Wakanda was always more comfortable with the old German Empire than with any other European power; Germany was the great alternative to Britain during the colonial period, and her explorers had actually been the first to penetrate to the shores of Lake Turkana – hence its alternate name of Lake Rudolf – yet she had never tried to invade the…"

"Rudolf?" ACS-9786-08 interrupted. "That lake in the middle of Wakanda is called Rudolf?"

"Sometimes."

"Oh." ACS-9786-08 stroked his chin. "So that's what Pond was talking about."

ACS-9786-04's eyes widened, and she laughed aloud. "You met Pond?"

"Yeah, in London," said ACS-9786-08. "The Vision brought him to Dr. Johnson's pub, and the four of us chewed the fat for a while about the whole Accords thing."

"You don't say," said ACS-9786-04. "Did he tell you the one about the Bulgarian political prisoner who went free because the officer carrying his reprieve got shot?"

"No, but he did…" ACS-9786-08 started, and then stopped and blinked. "Wait… carrying the _reprieve_? If they shot the guy with the reprieve, shouldn't the prisoner have been…"

"Later, Sam," said ACS-9786-02. "Nat, you were saying about Doom?"

ACS-9786-04 shrugged. "So far as his youth goes, there isn't much left to say," she said. "He accepted the transfer, and spent about a year and a half doing nothing in particular; then, on 12 October 1980, a fire unexpectedly broke out among the barges, and three of them, including West Germany's, sank with all hands. Which," she added, "had never happened before or since, and lent more credence to the theory that Doom's idle hands were a particularly devilish workshop; a witness on one of the surviving barges subsequently swore that he'd seen the young West German ambassador on deck that night, summoning purple lightning out of a hole in the sky. But, since Doom himself was among the missing who were presumed dead, nobody made much of it."

"And when did he show up alive again?" said ACS-9786-02.

"27 December 1991," said ACS-9786-04. "Less than 24 hours after the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, Victor Doom walked out of the grave into the main square at Kaliningrad and proclaimed a new era for Central Europe. To conceal his scars from the fire, he wore a long green cloak and a metal mask and gloves; still, it was unquestionably Doom – as he later made a point of proving at an impromptu college reunion at Tübingen. And his message to the people of Kaliningrad was that the modern world was dying of hatred and fanaticism because it had neglected the wisdom that brought it into being – that the post-Holocaust fear of Germany had spawned a fear of the Enlightenment rationality that Germany had always championed – and that it was their duty, as the townsfolk of Kant and the heart of old Prussia, to restore the world to sanity by sweet persuasion and fair example. They were, he said, to be the electuary of Europe; therefore, he then and there declared Königsberg to be the capital of the new Electuary Republic – _die Latwergerepublik_ , as he said."

" _Latwerge_ ," ACS-9786-02 repeated. "Hence, Latveria?"

ACS-9786-04 nodded. "It was a close thing," she said, "but Doom had his way; Latveria became a sovereign state, and her grateful people voted him a lifetime presidency, an official residence built on the site of the old royal palace, and, later on, an honorary 'Von' attached to his name for good measure. And nobody can say he hasn't returned the favor; in his hands, that little scrap of Baltic marshland has become one of the richest countries in the region, and also gained a ridiculous amount of moral influence in European affairs. 'The laic Vatican', she's been called; they say that half the E.U., and especially the major Germanic powers, never make a major policy decision without calling at Königsberger Doomschloss. It's Frederick the Great all over again, except that the people whose hero Doom is don't generally bother being Protestants."

" _I_ do."

It was ACS-9786-07 ["War Machine/James R."]'s first contribution to the discussion, and the other ACS's all turned to him with expressions indicative of surprise. "You, Rhodey?" said ACS-9786-10, wrinkling her nose. " _You're_ a Doomist?"

"I don't know what it's called in Sokovia," said ACS-9786-07. "I always just called it being a concerned human being. When a man takes a country with Latveria's kind of past, and he turns it into the place where everyone goes to find out what soft power and universal tolerance really look like, my values say you support him, not listen to a bunch of reactionary wing-nuts saying that he's got ulterior motives and is probably a witch."

"Rhodey…" said ACS-9786-02.

"No, wait a minute, Cap," said ACS-9786-07. "I get it, all right? I can smell what you and Nat are stepping in. I said I'd go along with you if you could get me a name; now Foster's found someone who was secretly behind the Accords all along, and who definitely has the clout to do everything you guys were theorizing on Monday. So, fine, I'll keep my word and help you keep the Avengers independent – but I just want it clear that I don't buy your conclusions. Victor Von Doom has a Nobel Peace Prize, which is one more than any of us have; you accuse him of murdering 79 people, bribing a police force, and trying to blow up the UNOC, and I don't care if you are Captain America, you're out of line."

"He didn't try to blow up the UNOC," said ACS-9786-04.

"Yeah, I know you didn't actually _say_ that, Nat, but…"

"I don't think it," said ACS-9786-04. "Why would Doom want the U.N. Assembly attacked just before the Accords vote? The whole point is that whoever rigged the Lagos business wanted the Accords to go through without a hitch; whatever the motives of Heimdall's bomber were, they obviously didn't have any connection to that."

"So you think there were _two_ elaborate conspiracies focused on the UNOC that day?" said ACS-9786-08. "That's a pretty crazy coincidence, isn't it?"

The edges of ACS-9786-04's mouth twitched upward. "At this level of intrigue, Sam, craziness is the one thing we can rely on," she said. "Don't worry, I'll handle that side of it. I already have my flight booked this evening for Bucharest; I've wanted to have a long talk with the Winter Soldier for seven years now, and this mask business gives me the perfect…"

* * *

ALERT: INCOMING DATUM PACKET SOURCE TZ-0851-9, TYPE 8D20F3F9BS (IMP-PRI-APX-2016-06-09-22H55M00S001: AUTHORIZATION "WSDELANY"). ALL HIGH-LEVEL COGNITIVE SUBROUTINES TO BE REROUTED TO MARK XLVI.

* * *

"Boss, they've identified the bomber," said FRIDAY.

"Name?" said ACS-9786-01 ["Iron Man/Tony S./Boss"], sealing his face-plate.

"Colonel Helmut Zemo, Sokovian Intelligence. Born June 16, 1978, Oraș Nou; parents Heinrich and Hilda Zemo, Romanian immigrants of Transylvanian Saxon descent…"

"Yeah, yeah, spare me the David Copperfield bit, FRIDAY. Most recent permanent residence?"

"Not really certain. He's moved around a good deal in the past year – but there is a cabin in the Carpathian Alps that he'd kept for five years, as a retreat to plan operations for his Echo Scorpion kill squad."

"Good enough for a start." The Mark XLVI's thrusters heated up. "Patch in the coordinates, and let's rock and roll."


	8. Throwing Down the Gauntlet

**_PÁPA_**

"So, Boss," said FRIDAY, as the departing Tony flashed a parting V-for-victory to the airmen below, "now that we're on our way, how about letting me in on the big secret you've uncovered?"

"Big secret?" said Tony glibly. "What big secret?"

"Come off it, Boss," said FRIDAY. "Ten minutes after Dr. Foster delivered her report, you hacked my main subconsciousness layer into Interpol's database, put an Apex-priority alert on the bomber's identity, and then flew to the nearest NATO air base to Vienna at twice the speed of sound. It doesn't take a Deep Thought to figure out that you're on the trail of something."

"Not necessarily," said Tony. "Maybe I just felt a sudden need to brush up on my Hungarian. That ever occur to you?"

There was a moment's pause before FRIDAY spoke again. "Fine, don't tell me, then," she said, in a tone of unmistakable sulkiness. "Of course you'd have told JARVIS, but I'm just a backup system, I know that."

"Now wait a minute…" said Tony.

"No, Boss, you're right," said FRIDAY. "It's not my place to claim special privileges just because of all the work I do for you. If JARVIS was special to you and I'm not, well, I just have to deal with it, that's all."

Tony paused a moment to grind his teeth. When, he wondered, had his AIs become sophisticated enough mimicries of human intelligence to give him guilt trips? Or had FRIDAY just acquired that capacity automatically when he'd made her feminine?

"Okay, fine," he said. "The mask on the bomber. You recognized that, right?"

"Of course," said FRIDAY. "A precise replica of the features of U. S. Army Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes."

"Right," said Tony. "So Zemo posed as Captain America's war buddy, and then tried to blow up a building containing Thor's girl. Could that be a coincidence? Sure. Is it likely? My gut says no."

"You think Zemo was out to get the Avengers?"

"It's the oldest pattern there is," said Tony. "You want to hurt Superman, you go for Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen. And nobody hurts _my_ Lois Lane," he added grimly, "and anyone who tries is sorry afterwards."

"But Zemo's already dead," FRIDAY pointed out.

"Doesn't mean Pepper's safe," said Tony. "He could have an accomplice; he could have an attack on her already set in motion; he could have plans lying around for someone else to find and execute. I don't know what he's got, and that's why I'm casing his hideout before anybody else can get a look at it."

"I see," said FRIDAY. "Well, I hope you find what you're looking for."

"I hope I don't," said Tony. "It'll be safer for everyone if it turns out not to exist. But you don't keep the world safe with that kind of wishful thinking."

* * *

FRIDAY seemed to have no particular response to this, and the rest of the flight took place in silence. It occurred to Tony that it was a pity he couldn't access his music library from the suit; a little Royal Guardsmen or something would put him in just the right frame of reference right about now. He made a mental note to look into that when he started work on the Mark XLVII.

It was a little after this that Zemo's hideout hove into sight. It was an elegant little cottage, nestled in a suitably bucolic mountain nook with a little brook flowing past – the sort of place where one expected to meet a merry, buxom peasant lass in dirndl and pigtails, not a vengeful assassin with grandiose schemes to bring down the Avengers. But Tony knew all too well how deceptive appearances could be.

He swooped low over the roof of the cottage, checking the chimney as he went past to verify that it was, indeed, too small to fit the Mark XLVI. (One of these days, he knew, he would actually get to make the Santa entrance, if he just kept looking for opportunities.) This confirmed, he descended to the doorstep, spent a few minutes deactivating what was, by Sokovian standards, quite a sophisticated security apparatus, and stepped inside to see what he could see.

His first thought, as he retracted his faceplate and helmet and glanced around, was that he and Zemo would have gotten along better than he had been imagining. Allowing, once again, for the difference in resources between a Sokovian snoop and the heir of Stark Industries, this quaint little interior could have stepped in for his own summer home in Aspen, no questions asked. There was the same bachelor-ish indifference to clutter and grime, the same unnecessary multiplicity of infotech gadgets, the same notebooks full of scribbled circuit diagrams lying every which where – even evidence of the same weaknesses: there was a half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya on the mantelpiece, and Tony could have sworn he saw the corner of a _Gurren Lagann_ DVD cover poking out from underneath a pile of dirty clothes.

"You're sure this guy's parents were really Transylvanians, FRIDAY?" he said. "Because I think I've just found my long-lost evil twin brother."

He could have sworn he felt FRIDAY shrug. "Sokovian intelligence records could always have been tampered with," she said. "Maybe Zemo was too embarrassed to let it be known that he was related to you."

"You're punchy today, aren't you?" Tony commented.

"It's also possible," FRIDAY continued imperturbably, "that Zemo hasn't been the principal resident here recently. There were others in Echo Scorpion who had the key – most notably Zemo's second-in-command, a Ph.D. and former Army engineer known as…"

"Wait a second," said Tony suddenly. "You hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"Shh!"

FRIDAY obediently curbed her non-existent tongue, and Tony pricked his ears attentively. Yes, there was definitely a voice there: a high-pitched, plaintive, unquestionably human voice, apparently coming from behind a door at the far end of the room. What it was saying, though, or whom to, he couldn't at all make out; it sounded like just the syllable _ri… ri… ri…_ repeated over and over.

As he approached the door, the voice got clearer and more unmistakably human-feminine (Tony was even willing to specify age: not more than fifteen, he felt sure), but no more coherent. Puzzled, he tried the door; finding it locked, he bent down and peered through the crack between the hinges.

The next moment, he jerked his eyes away again. One glimpse was enough; he had no desire to prolong his gaze. He felt unclean enough having seen the thing at all.

There was, indeed, a girl of no more than fifteen within. In other circumstances, she probably would have been a pretty girl: petite, fair, and slender, with a pert little chin and great big eyes that might have been either blue or sea-green. But Tony couldn't bring himself to think of her in those terms, simply because someone else had evidently been thinking of her in much more explicit versions thereof. She had been tied to a small cot pressed against the far wall; she was completely naked, with red marks on her side that unpleasantly suggested lash burns; and, unless Tony was much mistaken, she had recently been pumped full of some sort of powerful predator drug that had stupefied her without in any way tranquilizing her. (Hence, it seemed, the sounds he had heard: she was plainly trying to cry out in some sort of semi-conscious anguish, but _ri_ was about all that her tongue and Broca area were up for at the moment.)

 _I take it back,_ Tony thought. _I'd_ never _have gotten along with Zemo._

In a cooler moment, he might have reflected that it couldn't have been Zemo who'd done this to the girl; he had been dead for nearly 24 hours, and she was squirming far too vigorously to have been fed and watered no more recently than that. But the red in his eyes blinded him to such subtleties.

With tight, pale lips, he raised his hand and blasted the door into charred kindling, and then strode into the room towards the cot. His general plan – he hadn't yet worked it out in any detail – was to tear that rope in two by main force, smash a hole in the roof, fly the girl to the nearest working detox center, and then call Interpol and see if there were any leftover bits of Zemo on that mask that he could dance on.

But something interfered – or, rather, four somethings. Before he had made his third stride toward the cot, there was a sudden, sickening clatter of splintering wood, and four metallic objects, rather like souped-up toy-machine claws attached to segmented titanium hoses, smashed their way up through the floorboards and latched onto the four limbs of his suit. And no sooner had they done so than all his systems seemed to crash simultaneously, effectively immobilizing him where he stood; even FRIDAY gave a little strangled gasp and then went abruptly dead, leaving an eerily total silence where the friendly hum of her transmission frequency usually hovered.

As Tony struggled against the weight of the inert metal, he heard something slam in the main room beyond, and a portly man in a cardigan stepped into the bedroom, a revolver cocked in his right hand. "Why, Iron Man, as I live and breathe!" he exclaimed in mock astonishment, with only the faintest trace of a Romanian accent. "My humble home is greatly honored."

"Who are you?" Tony snapped.

"An unsung genius whose name would mean nothing to you," the other man replied, with no hint of irony. "Call me Krake, if you like; that was my call sign in Echo Scorpion. Helmut always did think himself rather funnier than he… oh, really, Mr. Stark, there's no sense in wasting your strength struggling. Even if your suit weren't completely deactivated, my beauties were designed to hold Captain America; there's no chance of _your_ overpowering them. I didn't know which of you would be dropping in, you see."

Tony glanced down again at the three-pronged pincers, and was forced to admit to himself that his opponent had reason on his side. "Pretty gentle grip for something that strong," he remarked.

"They were also designed to hold Bruce Banner," Krake replied dryly.

Had he known Tony Stark a bit better, he might have recognized the look that momentarily flitted across the inventor's face. "Oh," said Tony. "Yeah, that'd do it, all right. Can't have the Hulk showing up when all you want is to dispose of an Avenger quietly, can you?"

Krake made a wounded face. "Mr. Stark, you wholly misrepresent me," he said. "I admit that I am fully _prepared_ to dispose of you, but I would infinitely prefer not to have to. Such notoriety it would bring: 'Iron Man Killed by Sokovian Renegade' – not at all the sort of thing a reasonable man desires. And we are both reasonable men, are we not?"

"Dunno," said Tony. "I'm not feeling very reasonable right now, myself." And he jerked his head toward the girl on the bed.

"Ah, her," said Krake, with a superior little smile. "Yes, of course her plight would awaken a more atavistic side of such a paladin as yourself. But you must now realize, surely, that she is nothing to me but a lure to draw you in here?"

"No, I don't must," said Tony. "But I'll listen if you want to explain. And remember I'm atavistic, so use small words."

Krake sighed theatrically. "Consider, Mr. Stark," he said. "A year ago, you unleashed a genocidal artificial intelligence on the world, which manifested its will to destroy by reducing the capital of this nation to rubble, killing thousands in the surrounding villages in the process. Among these, as you surely know by now, were the wife and son of my commanding officer, Helmut Zemo, who thereupon vowed revenge on your organization as a whole."

Tony's head perked up; in all the excitement, he'd almost forgotten about Pepper. "Right, about that," he said. "What…"

"If you please, Mr. Stark. I, myself, am of a more practical bent; to me, the destruction of Oraș Nou meant, not an injury to be requited, but a power vacuum in Sokovia that would – if I knew our government as well as one of my clearance ought – take quite some time to fill itself again. There was an opportunity here, for one with the intelligence and will to seize it – so, while Helmut roved off to Minsk and Cleveland and wherever else took his fancy, I retired to this charming cottage of his, established myself as Master-Planner of the local affairs, and settled down to receive the tribute of a grateful peasantry."

"How Sicilian of you," said Tony. "Sokovia really is the crossroads of Europe, isn't it?"

"No doubt," said Krake. "But you might dispense with that tone of moral censure, Mr. Stark. I would tolerate it from Captain Rogers, but it rings false from you – you, the so-practical arms dealer with no more illusions about ideal government than I myself have. What is legitimacy, but the power of a few to persuade the many to abide by their decrees? That is what your President has; it is what the Mafia had; and, with no central authority left in Sokovia and the police converted into militias for five squabbling parliamentary cliques, it is unquestionably what I have. If you wish to reprimand me because my judgments are not reached by appealing to a scrap of paper, by all means do so."

Tony was silent, and after a moment Krake went on. "But I knew, of course," he said, "that, sooner or later, Helmut would succeed in forcing himself on the Avengers' attention – and that, when he did, there was every likelihood that one of you would come and investigate his old hideout. So I cobbled together a means of dealing with that – as you see." He ran his eyes lovingly over the many-jointed claw-hoses. "Simple and economical, yet most effective – and versatile: that was key, of course. But it had the disadvantage of being bound to one particular spot; therefore, I had to draw whichever of you arrived to this one spot – and quickly, before you had too much chance to snoop around in my private effects. And what draws a hero more readily than a damsel in distress?" He beamed with insufferable self-satisfaction.

Again, a certain look flickered across Tony's face for an instant; again, it was gone the next. "Uh-huh," he said. "So you never actually laid a hand on her? All done with mirrors?"

Krake's beam turned into more of a smirk. "Well, I won't claim quite that degree of purity," he said. "I got her from a nearby orphanage a month ago, and the nights get long and tedious in these parts."

Tony spat.

"Yes, I'm sure you think so," said Krake. "But it's really none of your concern, Mr. Stark. As I say, we are both reasonable men, and our goals are quite compatible; I want to continue my decent existence here without disruption, and you, I am sure, want to leave this cottage alive. Pledge me the former, and I will gladly permit the latter – as soon, of course, as I have made certain modifications to your armor to keep you from… wait a minute, what… no! _No!_ "

* * *

A crucial factor in Tony Stark's remarkable array of achievements was his ability, when faced with an interesting problem, to seal off the engineering portion of his brain and set it to work while the rest of his mind attended to other matters. It had gotten him through more than one deathly dull society gala, and produced several of his most acclaimed devices – and, on this occasion, it arguably saved his life.

The first key had come when he learned that Krake's trap had been built with Bruce in mind no less than the other Avengers. Knowing this, he had looked again at the mechanism itself, and reverse-engineered it in his mind: it was certain that it was interfering with his suit's signal relays in some way; it was ridiculous, looking at the bare-bones design of the thing, to suppose that it was equipped with radio projection; most likely, therefore, it was sending out some sort of controlled electromagnetic surge to just overwhelm FRIDAY and her subsystems. But, in that case, the thing had to have multiple settings, since nobody who valued his hide would send an electromagnetic surge into Bruce Banner. And that, in turn, suggested a very delicate and probably somewhat fussy wiring setup, which, if it shorted out at any point – and Tony couldn't help noticing that the fine wiring at the base of his right arm's captor was relatively exposed – might well cease entirely to function as its inventor intended. A nebulous plan of action began to form in Tony's mind; he filed it, and waited for further light.

It came with Krake's remark that the trap only functioned in that one spot. Tony had already suspected that the hoses were of strictly limited length, and this confirmed it; ergo, their central control was overwhelmingly likely to be at the nearest point of convergence to the four holes in the floor – in other words, directly below him. The gamble was now officially worth taking; all he had to do was wait for an occasion when it would be natural for him to spit – which, from what he'd seen of Krake, he suspected would arrive momentarily – and then pray that he could get his saliva where he needed it to go.

It did, and he did. There was a little crackle of electricity, a faint smell of smoke, and his right gauntlet was back under his mental control. With agonizing caution (the position of his left leg kept Krake from seeing anything directly, but one stray glint of reflected light could still spell doom) he loosed it from his hand and rotated it, an inch at a time, until its thruster was facing directly toward the ceiling.

Then he fired.

He couldn't blame Krake for being nonplussed for a moment; if he hadn't known better, he'd have thought that a meteor had just smashed through the floor. But he had more important things to focus on; shooting a glance into the hole that the gauntlet had made, he scanned the control console it had revealed, searching for the control that dictated the claws' settings. Within half a second, he had located a color-coded dial and sent his gauntlet to ram it – and that was just as well, for, if he'd taken three-quarters of a second, he might not have lived to tell about it. As it was, Krake's first shot went wide, missing Tony by a full inch and embedding itself in the wall; by the time he fired his second, Tony's helm was already up, and his other hand was free to prevent there being a third.

As Krake staggered back against the wall, clutching the wrist of his burned right hand, Tony, fully armored once again, strode forward and grabbed him by the collar. "Okay, Don Corleone," he said tartly, "now it's your turn to be reasonable. I've got a question for you; I want it answered truthfully; a reasonable man does what the angry guy with the blasters on his hands wants. You follow?"

"Yes," Krake gasped.

"Good," said Tony. "What were your boss's plans for Pepper?"

Krake stared. "Pepper?" he repeated. "You mean Virginia Potts?"

"I don't mean Sandra Denton."

"Ah," said Krake. "Well, then, if you ask what Helmut planned for Miss Potts – or for anyone, really – then the truthful answer is that I don't know. No, wait!" he added frantically, as Tony lifted him a little higher. "You don't understand, Mr. Stark: Helmut was deranged! His wife and son were all that had kept him grounded through the years; when he lost them, it cut him off from reality entirely. He spent all his waking hours weaving absurdly elaborate revenge schemes with gaping logical holes; a child would have seen that they could never have succeeded, unless some outlandish stroke of fortune intervened. And then he ceased to communicate, and a few days later he went abroad; who knows what insane visions might have come into his head after that? So truly, Mr. Stark, I don't know what his reason was for bombing the United Nations; I only know that you and yours have nothing to fear from it. Nothing, I tell you!"

Tony stared up at him for a long moment, and the sight seemed to whip him into a greater panic. "Don't!" he shrieked. "What more can you want from me? Do you want my journals? They're in the bureau behind you. Do you want the girl? There's an emetic in the kitchen that will restore her. Do you want the service of my brain? I am your slave – your slave, I say! Only speak!"

"What I want…" Tony began; then he paused, and shook his head. "Never mind."

He slammed Krake's head against the wall, and the Sokovian went out like a light; then he dragged him over to the hole in the floor, used a controlled beam to set the trap to its Captain America setting (just to be safe), and bound Krake with his own "beauties". (Of course, only three of the claws were currently functional – but, then, only one of Krake's hands was, either, so that was all right.) This done, he straightened himself and turned to face the cot where a drug-addled orphan girl was still writhing and gabbling, _ri… ri… ri…_

"Okay, Riri," he muttered, "let's see about you now."

* * *

He had to give Krake credit: the man was unquestionably slime, but he knew how to mix his detox juice. After the girl had spent about three minutes retching everything she had over herself, the cot, and (in the first batch, before he knew to move) his armor, she slowly looked up, blinking in the dim light, and her face, though pale and tremulous, was entirely lucid. Indeed, there was a light in her eyes (definitely sea-green, now that he saw them up close) that, allowing for the circumstances, he couldn't help but call lively; even in her groggy, weakened state, she exuded an almost monkeyish vivacity and curiosity, and perhaps a hint of devilry along with it. Having gotten his last one so wrong, Tony was feeling wary of snap judgments – but, all the same, he was pretty sure that he liked this girl.

"You're not as tall as you look on television," were her first words. (Her English, though rather thickly accented, was technically just as good as Krake's – or as Wanda's and Pietro's, for that matter. Tony wondered idly whether there was anyone in Sokovia who _didn't_ speak perfect English.)

"I make them all photograph me while kneeling," he said. "It feeds my God complex."

The girl gave him a wry look. "You can say that, Mr. Stark," she said, "but I know what the pride of the devils is really like." She glanced at the unconscious Krake, and unsuccessfully suppressed a shudder. "He was afraid of you, you know. After he heard about Vienna, he spent hours just staring out that window with binoculars, waiting for one of you to come. So you _must_ be good," she concluded, looking up at Tony with sparkling eyes. "He was always sure he could control other evil people; it was the good that scared him."

Tony remembered Krake's repeated talk about "reasonable men", and chuckled. "Well, maybe," he said. "But if I'm going to be as upright as all that, I'd better turn around now and let you go clean up and find some clothes to put on. Gregory Peck's probably already ashamed of me."

He suited the action to the word, and soon a patter of unsteady footsteps told him that the girl had taken his suggestion. With a sigh, he retracted his helm, walked over to the window she had indicated, and gazed out at the daisy-studded valley that surrounded the cottage, and the ruggedly verdant mountain peaks beyond.

 _This really is some country they have here,_ he thought. _I can see why Wanda and Pietro fought so fiercely for it._

And now the place was in chaos: five parties claiming the demolished capital, thugs like Krake lording it up in the provinces, probably a full-dress civil war in the offing as soon as the power concentrations got high enough… all because he'd had to go and loose Ultron on the world. Yeah, he'd done his bit to subdue him again, but still, this country had deserved better from him.

Much better.

In fact…

He frowned, studying the idea in his mind: shaking it, sniffing at it, shining lights on it from various angles, placing transparent overlays on it…

"Yeah," he said aloud. "Yeah, we could do that."

"That?" said FRIDAY, speaking for the first time since the surge had knocked her out. "That what?"

"FRIDAY, check me on this," said Tony. "When you've broken something, shouldn't you fix it if you can?"

"Yes…"

"Don't you think I could fix Sokovia?"

There was a moment's pause, then: "Come again, Boss?"

"I mean, all the materials are here," said Tony. "Good land, honest people, a strong cultural heritage – they were HRE back in the day, weren't they? All it would take is someone who can see how to put everything together, and persuade the locals to get in line behind him."

"Boss, I'm not sure…"

"I know it'll be tricky getting them to accept an American leader," Tony continued, barely hearing his AI's attempted interjection. "But not as hard as other places would be; they're already an ethnic mishmash, and we've seen how much of a barrier language isn't. And Riri could help out with that. I'd give her some kind of semi-official status – sidekick, Infanta, Iron Maiden, whatever she wants to be called…"

"Boss, do you really think this is wise?" said FRIDAY. "Just yesterday the U.N. was meeting to decide whether the Avengers should even control their own powers; what are they going to say when one of you goes off to play Cromwell in eastern Europe?" She paused, and then threw in, "For that matter, what's Captain Rogers going to say?"

Tony pursed his lips, and drummed his fingers on the windowsill for a moment; then he raised his eyes again to the verdure-crowned Carpathians of northern Sokovia. "I don't know," he said softly. "But it can't be any worse than what my ghosts will say, if I just fly out of here and leave this place to fend for itself." He shook his head. "Can't be. I'm doing this, FRIDAY. And no," he added with a smirk, "JARVIS couldn't have talked me out of it."

FRIDAY's reply came as promptly as a good machine's ought to. "Okay, Boss," she said. "If that's what you have to do, then go ahead. You know I'm with you."

"Glad to hear it," said Tony. "First of all, how about shooting me the Zenit reports on Oraș Nou for the past year? I ought to at least learn these Parliament guys' names before I put them out of business."


	9. One Size Fits All?

Old Maria Cotar brought forth a bundle of beets with the solemnity of a Wakandan priestess exposing the Eye of Bast. "Finest of the spring sowing, Domnule Barnes," she said. "I could have had top lion for them in the Old Town, but I said to myself, 'No, Măriuca, you must encourage your poor American friend who is just learning to appreciate real food.' So for your sake, _copilul meu_ , I rob myself and only ask ten lei."

Bucky took the beets in his metal hand, and ran his flesh one over the surface of each root. So far as a city boy like him could judge, they were indeed fine specimens: sturdy heft, firm flesh, no perceptible abrasions. Of course, ten lions was still a ridiculous price, but that was to be expected; he'd spent enough time dickering with Romanian peasants lately to figure out how the game was played.

"Not bad at all, Doamnă Cotar," he said. "I'm almost tempted to give it a try. Of course, no good American ever eats foreign vegetables, but if it were a really good deal – say, two lei – I just might be able to overlook that."

Mrs. Cotar laughed heartily. "Oh, Domnule Barnes, I do love your American sense of humor," she said. "It is worth impoverishing oneself to be on good terms with such neighbors. Suppose we say eight lei."

Bucky, in his turn, heaved a dramatic sigh. "Ah, neighbors," he said. "You've found my weak spot, Doamnă Cotar. When I think of the old Brooklyn neighborhood of my youth, a flood of sentimentality overwhelms my reason, and even paying three lei fifty for a bundle of beets seems reasonable."

"Oh, Domnule Barnes, shame on you!" Mrs. Cotar exclaimed. "You know how my judgment fails me when you remind me of the losses you have suffered – how the wicked Soviet _Hidre_ robbed you of your youth and innocence that they might use you as their tool. Never, though it cost me all my livelihood, can I demand full price from one whom fate has used so cruelly. Five lei and twenty bani."

"Deal," said Bucky.

As he pulled out his wallet to withdraw the appropriate notes and coins, a woman's voice sounded behind him – a light, amused voice, but with a quiet note of ever-present danger underneath. "And this is the way in which bargains were struck of old time in these hills," it said, "when your fathers and mine lived and shivered in a cave, hunted wolves, and bargained with clubs only."

Bucky turned, and saw the red-headed figure behind him. A ten-ban piece fell from his fingers, and he had to pause for a moment to clamp down on the instincts surging within him. Having achieved this, he said neutrally, "Agent Romanova."

The Black Widow shook her head with a small smile. "Just Romanoff, now," she said. "My adopted country doesn't use feminized surnames. Apparently Americans don't like to be reminded that some of them are also women."

As Bucky considered what to make of that, she reached down, picked up the coin he had dropped, and handed it to Mrs. Cotar. "So," she said, turning back to him and glancing at the beets. "Any specific plans for those, Sergeant Barnes?"

Something about her manner made up Bucky's mind. It was quite plainly oriented toward establishing an easy rapport, befitting their common acquaintance and their likely shared interests. Or, as his more innocent self from seventy years before would have put it, she was clearly trying to make friends. Which he had no real problem with; he could use all the strong allies he could get, especially in his present circumstances – and, besides, she _was_ a friend of Steve's. And so, rather than grow wary at her overture, he shrugged casually and said, "I was thinking something in the soup line. You know, I spent over fifty years in Russia, but I've never actually tasted borscht? I figure it's time to fix that."

Romanoff nodded approvingly. "What kind of stock are you using?" she said.

Bucky hesitated. "Well… I hadn't really gotten that far, actually."

"Well, take an old Russkaya's advice, then, and spring for beef," said Romanoff. "There's nothing wrong with pork on its own, but it's overrated as a soup base – and a taste for fish or mushroom borscht isn't something you get just by being well-intentioned."

Bucky grinned despite himself, and Romanoff smiled again, a hair wider than before. "Though, honestly, I was never much of a soup person to begin with," she said. "That was Yelena's department; I was always the little tsarevna with the incorrigible sweet tooth. Give me a little table at a tea-shop and a plate of sweet _blini_ to nibble at, and I'm a happy girl."

Bucky nodded. "Yeah, that sounds all right," he agreed.

Oddly, this caused a look of mild annoyance to pass over Romanoff's face, as though he had missed some sort of cue she had expected him to pick up. "I think so," she said. "Especially when there's someone else at the table with you – someone you'd like to get to know a bit better, and find out what he thinks about the things that matter to you."

Even this broad hint might have taken some time to penetrate Bucky's mind – that mind that had for so long been used by others as a mere helpless instrument of unspeakable deeds, and that simply wasn't equipped anymore for this kind of subtlety – had not Mrs. Cotar chuckled behind him. "Take her up, Domnule Barnes," she said. "It isn't every day that beautiful women are so kindly."

Bucky turned to her with a puzzled look, and she elaborated, "Obviously, she wants to ask you about the mystery man in Vienna who was wearing your face; why else would she be here, when the Avengers have so much else to occupy them? But she would have you make the first move – perhaps for some subtle advantage that only she can see, but I would rather think that she has compassion for your days of wintry soldiering, and wishes to give you back some measure of your volition."

Bucky tried that idea on for size, and had to concede that it did sound like something a legendary super-spy and friend of Steve's would do. "Huh," he said. "Okay, then. Thanks, Doamnă Cotar."

"Not at all, Domnule Barnes," said Mrs. Cotar. "Such counsel I dispense free of charge. For the beets, though, I still need five lei ten."

"Oh, right," said Bucky, remembering, and handed her the rest of her money. This done, he turned back to the other woman, put on what he hoped was a charming smile, and said, "Well, Agent Romanoff, what do you say we drop by this little tea shop I know on Strada Pitar Moṣ? Maybe we could get to know each other a bit better, and find out what we think about the things that matter to us."

"I think I'd like that," said Romanoff.

* * *

So Bucky hailed a cab and gave the driver the address, and, a few minutes later, the two most dangerous assassins on Earth were sitting and sipping tea at a charming little patio table in one of Bucharest's higher-end neighborhoods. (A third, who would have been just as deadly had he used ordinary sharpened arrows, was at a gas station picking up hot-dog buns for his wife. Meanwhile, the Latverian ambassador to the U.N. was fine-tuning a speech denouncing "enhanced operatives" as tireless, inhuman foes of ordinary people everywhere.)

"You know, Sergeant, you're a hard man to reach," said Romanoff. "I got into Bucharest in the wee hours of the morning, and it was past noon before I'd manage to locate you. Do you just cease to exist when the local farmers' market isn't in session, or are there wrinkles to the art of keeping a low profile that I'm not aware of?"

Her tone was casual enough, but Bucky could tell she was uncomfortable with the thought of what such wrinkles might entail, if _she_ wasn't aware of them. Preferring not to disturb her mind, and not caring to reveal all his secrets in any case, he deflected the question with, "Well, I know some that a few people might have thought _I_ wasn't aware of, if what's-his-name up in Asgard hadn't been so quick on the draw. Like the one about not letting your face show up on a security camera while you're sneaking on board a news van to blow it up."

Romanoff made a wry face. "Yes, that is pretty basic, isn't it?" she said. "Bad enough to be framed, but to be made to look like an idiot on top of it… if it were me, I'd want to give the perpetrator a little payback for that."

This time Bucky did catch the implication. He wasn't prepared to bite just yet, though. "Hard to pay back a dead man," he said guardedly.

"Not always," said Romanoff. "Sometimes a man's work outlives him."

 _Ah, so…_ "And what kind of work would that be?"

"You tell me," said Romanoff. "I assume you've asked yourself why somebody would be walking around Vienna with your face; I know I would have. If you'd care to share what you've come up with, I'm sure the other Avengers would be glad to hear about it."

At this juncture, their waiter arrived with the _albiniţa_ Romanoff had ordered, and she interrupted herself for a few minutes' sternly self-controlled rapture. While she ate, Bucky considered her invitation, searching it for hidden loopholes; concluding, at length, that she meant just what she seemed to be saying – _the team commanded by your last friend on Earth wants to avenge you, and we could use your help_ – he decided that she had him dead to rights, and he might as well share such thoughts as he had formed about his impersonator's probable tactics.

"Okay, Agent Romanoff," he said, once there was nothing left of the little layered honey cakes but a few stray crumbs on the super-spy's cheek. "I guess you do have an interest in that whole business, given what they were there to vote on. I don't actually know what the official Avengers position is on the Accords, but, whatever it is…"

"I don't think we have one, actually," said Romanoff.

Bucky blinked. "One what?"

"An official position," said Romanoff. "On the Accords."

Bucky stared. "You're kidding."

Romanoff shook her head. "You credit us with too much structure, Sergeant," she said. "Next you'll be suggesting we should have bylaws."

"Don't you?"

"Nope," said Romanoff. "No bylaws, no formal leadership, no membership qualifications – none of the things you expect an organization to have. Because we're not an organization, not really," she said with a little smile. "We're just a few people who love each other, and who happen to be good at saving things."

Bucky digested that for a long moment, then shook his head. "That's not good," he said. "A high-profile group like you are should have something concrete holding you together. Personal affection is too easy to subvert; one good difference of principle could do it, much less an actual enemy."

Romanoff nodded. "I thought that, once," she said. "But I'm not so sure now. If your friends have to be bound to you by laws and contracts, they're not really your friends, are they? And friendship is a powerful thing, Sergeant – more powerful than it's easy to remember, in our world."

It surprised Bucky how moved he was by those last two words. _Our world_ : it was easy to forget that it wasn't just his world – that other souls had been tarnished in the same mire as had produced the Winter Soldier. He sipped his tea and looked at his luncheon partner with newfound appreciation as she continued, "I suppose sooner or later we may have to form such contracts – even if the U.N. doesn't vote tonight to impose them on us willy-nilly. But they can't ever be what makes us the Avengers. If they were, the Avengers wouldn't be anything like the force we are."

Bucky nodded slowly. "Okay, I can see that," he said. "But I still think you should have better defenses in place than just your own feelings. Even if the Avengers are more than what we see from the outside, what we do see is still a tremendous power for good; people watch the Earth's mightiest heroes putting themselves on the line just because it's the right thing to do, and they think maybe there's some point after all in being honest and caring about others. You owe it to them to make sure that you don't just fall apart if that friendship of yours ever cools."

"And you think having an official position on the Accords would help with that?" said Romanoff.

"I think you've got to have a unified response to things that affect the group," said Bucky. "If you don't, you're just asking for dissensions, feuds, schisms – just trouble generally."

"All right, then," said Romanoff. "You tell me what our unified position should be, Sergeant, and I'll see that it reaches Steve and Rhodey – that's War Machine," she clarified, seeing Bucky's puzzled look, "– before they head out to Manhattan tonight for the new U.N. meeting."

Bucky smirked. "Jane Foster wasn't available this time, huh?"

"No," said Romanoff. "And even if she had been, Rhodey and Steve wouldn't have been willing to leave matters in her hands; their outlook on things changed a bit, when we heard all that she'd learned in Vienna. But that's not your affair, Sergeant," she added firmly. "Go ahead; tell me what our position should be."

Bucky took a deep breath. "Well, about the Accords themselves, it's not my call to make," he said. "Whether you folks want to be a U.N. strike team or not, it's between you and the U.N., not me. But what I can say is that, whichever way you go, it has to be just about the Avengers."

Romanoff cocked her head. "How do you mean?"

"This whole cockadoodle of 'enhanced persons'," said Bucky. "You need to kill that category now, before the witch-hunts start. It has to be absolutely clear to everyone – the U.N., the governments, the media, the people – that you can't tell someone, 'You're an enhanced person, the same as the Avengers are, so the Sokovia Accords mean we can run or ruin your life, too.'

"Because who are the Avengers?" he said, and thrust out his metal thumb. "You have Steve, Hulk, and the girl; okay, those three really are enhanced humans. But then you also have Thor and the Vision," and his index finger came out. "They aren't enhanced from anything; they're just powerful because that's the kind of thing they are." His middle finger went down. "Then you have Stark. He has super-powerful tools, but he himself isn't anything special – and yeah, I'm sure Pepper Potts would say otherwise, but you know what I mean. And the same goes for Gray Stark – Rhodey, whatever you called him – and the Negro bird-man." Ring finger. "Then there's you. As far as I know, you don't have any special powers _or_ tools; you got into the Avengers by sheer skill alone. And there's the archer, who's you with a little bit of Stark: a world-class skill level, plus just enough special gadgetry to make it formidable."

He leaned back in his seat, and spread his arms. "So what's an 'enhanced person', then? If the U.N. is trying to create this general category of people, and all the Avengers are in it, what the hell can its parameters be? And, if there is any category broad enough to cover you _and_ Stark _and_ Steve _and_ Thor, who's to say that it can't also cover anyone that any politician might happen to dislike someday?" (He thought of his cousin in New Hampshire, who had had her Fallopian tubes cut out for being "mentally deficient" – which, as far as his family had ever been able to tell, had meant poor and Catholic.) "You go down that road, there's nothing but trouble at the end. So there's a policy for the Avengers, if you want one: keeping the world off it."

Romanoff stared speculatively at him for a long moment. "That's good, Sergeant," she said at length, a slow smile spreading across her face. "That's very good."

Bucky dipped his head modestly. "Well, you know," he said, "anything to oblige a lady."

At that, Romanoff pursed her lips, and lowered her eyes to the table. "Oh, I don't make that claim, Sergeant," she said, with a faint but distinct touch of bitterness in her voice.

"Maybe not," said Bucky, "but I do. There's only two things a woman who looks and carries herself like you can be, and Steve wouldn't be friends with the other one." He chuckled, and added, "Besides, who but a lady would get a guy's attention by quoting Hilaire Belloc to him?"

Romanoff glanced up sharply. "You recognized that?"

"Catholic schoolboy from the '40s," Bucky reminded her. "My history teacher thought _The Path to Rome_ was the only good thing to come out of England since the Battle of the Boyne. I wouldn't go that far, myself, but it was good; I liked the story about the Devil and the hole in the floor."

"Ah, yes," said Romanoff, and waved her hand like the lady she didn't claim to be. "'And I,'" she said, in a 21st-Century Russian-American's idea of the voice of St. Charles Borromeo, "'I have the Pope!'"

"Yeah, that's the one," said Bucky.

"Well, good for you, Sergeant," said Romanoff. "If I ever meet your history teacher, I'll have to be sure and compliment him on his good taste."

"Her," Bucky corrected her. "Sister Bernadette."

"Her good taste, then," said Romanoff indifferently, and took another sip of her tea. "And now, how about your thoughts on the Vienna incident? I think that was what we were originally talking about, before we got so far off track."

Bucky, who had wholly forgotten about Zemo, had to think for a moment. "Oh," he said. "That. Right. Well, it's a long shot, but, if I had your skills, Agent Romanoff, I'd think about seeing if our friend left any traces in Berlin."

Romanoff arched an eyebrow. "Now, why Berlin?" she said.

"That's where the Joint Counter-Terrorism Center is," said Bucky. "If the UNOC bombing had come off, I have to believe the JTTF would have been tasked with taking me down – and once they had me, of course they'd want to question me at their own headquarters. I can't think of anything else that framing me would achieve, and our friend must have had a reason for taking so much trouble to do that, so I would guess that having me in Berlin was important to him for some reason. In which case, he's likely enough to have had a hideout there – and that might be worth casing, if you find it in time."

Romanoff considered this. It didn't seem to deeply impress her, but she nodded nonetheless. "Yes, I suppose that's worth a look," she said. "Anyway, I wouldn't mind paying a visit to Berlin; it's been a while since I was last there, and there are several Berliners I have fond memories of."

Bucky glanced at her empty _albiniţa_ plate. "As in people, or pastries?"

Romanoff only smiled, finished her tea, and rose. "Well," she said, "I suppose I'd better get on that, then. Thank you for your help, Sergeant."

"Any time," said Bucky.

* * *

As he watched her turn and start to walk away, he had an odd feeling that he had left out something – that the sort of communion the two of them had just shared laid an obligation on them that neither had properly fulfilled. For a moment, the long loneliness of his Winter-Soldierhood lay between it and him; then he realized.

"Hey," he called. "Agent Romanoff?"

Romanoff's stride halted, and she turned her russet head with an air of surprise. "Yes?"

Her fellow ex-tool of tyrants gave her a crooked smile. "Call me Bucky."

Romanoff showed no reaction for half a second; then a smile of recognition spread over her own face also. "Natasha," she said.

Bucky nodded, and lifted his teacup in farewell. He watched his new friend recede until she disappeared behind the Bucharest skyline; then, as though to complete the picture, he hailed the waiter and ordered a little honeybee cake of his own.


	10. When the Mask Slips

**_MANHATTAN_**

When Rhodey's cab pulled up outside the U.N. building, Steve, in full Captain America regalia, was already there waiting for him. Indeed, it was the regalia that had brought that about: the first cab they'd hailed hadn't had room for both men plus the shield, and so Rhodey had told Steve to go on ahead and let him catch up. (To be honest, he'd been just as glad not to be at close quarters with the Captain, with the issue of Victor Von Doom's true character lying between them like a land mine. Steve didn't understand: Latveria was the dream that Rhodey's parents had marched for, the vision of a better world that Rhodey himself had joined the Air Force in the hopes of someday helping America to become. Never mind what this mess with the Accords might make it look like; until he actually saw Doom's government obstructing justice with his own eyes, he just wasn't going to believe it.)

"Looking good, airman," said Steve approvingly. "Might want to straighten your wings, though."

Glancing down, Rhodey saw that the Air Force insignia on his uniform lapel was indeed askew, and corrected it accordingly. "Maybe I should have come in Avenger mufti, too," he remarked. "Might have been less of a hassle."

Steve shook his head. "No, I think you made the right call," he said. "My suit means citizenship and the traditions of liberty; yours just means business. If you'd come to a peaceful gathering in War Machine armor, people wouldn't think you were showing your Avenger pride; they'd think you expected trouble."

"Well, we don't know there isn't going to be trouble," Rhodey noted.

"Yeah, but there's no point in asking for it," said Steve. "Anyway, you've got your little radio thing to summon the suit if you need to, right?"

Rhodey wordlessly raised his wrist, displaying the Stark-tech signal emitter attached to his wristwatch, and Steve nodded. "There you go, then," he said. "Showing up in square-jawed gray steel would just have been overkill."

"Gold-titanium," Rhodey corrected him.

"Whatever."

In fact, Rhodey had never much cared about the distinction, either, but he didn't want to think about what might happen if Steve described the Mark III as "steel" in front of Tony. "Well, come on, Cap," he said, straightening his own. "Let's go help make the world safe for democracy."

Steve grinned. "Sounds good to me."

* * *

Whatever had kept the 84 anti-Accords delegates away from the Thursday meeting in Vienna, it didn't seem to apply in New York that day. Scuttlebutt had been that all 201 member states were making a point of showing up this time, and the scene in the U.N. building's entrance hall bore that out; the place was thronged with international dignitaries of every human shape and hue, and Rhodey suspected that he would have had real trouble navigating the crush if he had come alone. But there was something about a six-foot, muscle-bound man in a bright blue costume and carrying an indestructible shield that seemed to encourage people to make way for him. (Who'd have thought?)

As the two of them made their way through the room and began to ascend the stairs, Steve paused and cocked his head. "Hang on," he said. "Rhodey, did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" said Rhodey, feeling fairly sure that he hadn't. (After all, he'd never been treated with Super-Soldier Serum, so his ears were just the ordinary garden variety.)

Steve gestured toward a row of recessed windows a few yards off. "Someone over there just said something about the Accords and false pretenses," he said. "I couldn't quite tell through the accent, but it sounded like the king of Wakanda."

That got Rhodey's attention. He strained his ears to listen in the direction Steve had indicated, and found to his surprise that he could pick out the voice in question with relative ease. Evidently the speaker (and Steve was right, it did sound like T'Chaka) was counting on the hubbub in the entrance hall to drown out his words – or maybe he was so ticked that he didn't care who heard him.

"It is no use making excuses, Ambassador," he said. "Justify the matter as you will, the fact remains that your government deceived us. You spoke of Wakanda's sufferings moving the whole world to action, but it is plain now that you only meant them to serve as a basis for your trickery."

The unidentified Ambassador interposed something at this point – what, Rhodey couldn't make out, though the mere tone of the voice sent shivers down his spine. But T'Chaka (if it was T'Chaka) was undaunted. "Then why did you fear to meet our opponents?" he demanded. "And why did you lead us to believe that there was nothing unusual about the Vienna meeting? To threaten and bully so many ambassadors into avoiding the vote would have been bad enough, but to do it in Wakanda's name – to present our honorable people as conspirators and hypocrites… why, Ambassador?"

The Ambassador's reason, if any, reached Rhodey's ears only as another low and ominous rumble. A moment's silence followed it; then T'Chaka spoke again, even more clearly, it seemed, than before. "Well," he said, "then you may tell your President that he need make no further plans concerning Wakanda. It is true that we have no wish to be his enemy, but neither do we care for the way he treats his friends."

The next moment, he emerged from the window recess, wearing a tight-lipped scowl that seemed almost unnatural on his wide, pleasant face. As he made for the stairway, Rhodey instinctively scooted closer to the banister to let him by, and wondered vaguely if now was a good time to make some sort of overture to His Majesty – but then the Ambassador to whom T'Chaka had been speaking also stepped into view, and suddenly there was no room left in Rhodey's mind for weighing politic gestures. All his common sense was swamped by the sudden sight of that swarthy, black-bearded face atop that immensely muscular body, and the reappraisal it demanded of his deeply held beliefs about the world he lived in.

Steve noticed his reaction, and followed his gaze to the Ambassador. "Who's that?" he said softly.

"The Latverian ambassador to the U.N."

Rhodey's voice sounded hoarse and strained even to him; Steve must have noticed even more, but he tactfully refrained from comment. "That guy's Latverian?" he said in surprise, casting his eyes over the hulking mulatto. "I thought they were a northern European country."

"He's an immigrant," Rhodey managed. (A few minutes earlier, he would have spoken with defiant pride of the ideal of universal brotherhood that made Latveria a model for the world, but somehow he wasn't up for that now.) "Remember what Nat said about Doom getting lost on Lake Turkana when the Wakandan embassy boats caught fire? That guy's father found him washed up on the shore in northern Kenya, took him in, and nursed him back to health; he made a big hit with the family, and when he went to Kaliningrad in '91 to declare the _Latwergerepublik_ , Sergei there insisted on going with him. He's been a major player in European politics ever since."

"Sergei?" said Steve. "He's Russian, then?"

"His dad was," said Rhodey. "A former general run out during one of Stalin's purges; he settled in Kenya, took up big-game hunting – a hobby he very much passed on to his son – and married some kind of local Masai princess. Of course, that just appalled the folks back home, but by that point he didn't care – and neither does his son, apparently."

Steve smirked. "You mean, because he didn't mind helping Doom take a major port from the Motherland?"

"Well, that too," said Rhodey, "but I was thinking of a famous interview he gave with Connie Chung back in the '90s. She asked him what, based on his background, he thought of himself as; was he more of a Russian, or a Kenyan, or a Latverian? And he just said, in that huge gravelly voice of his, 'I am a hunter.'" He managed a faint chuckle at the memory. "The tabloids latched onto that one like starving coon-hounds, and gave our boy there a nickname the world will never forget. You ask the man on the street who Sergei Kravenoff is, and three-quarters of them probably couldn't tell you to save their lives – but you'd better believe they've heard of Kraven the Hunter."

"Huh," said Steve.

He was silent for a long moment, staring at the window recess from which Kravenoff and T'Chaka had emerged. "So that was Latveria that His Majesty was saying all that about," he said at length, and turned to look Rhodey squarely in the eye. "I'd say the honeymoon's over, wouldn't you?"

Rhodey pursed his lips, and nodded. "Guess so."

* * *

And yet, as he settled into his seat in the observers' row (and tossed his cap into Steve's, his colleague having gone looking for a delegate to voice the concerns about the enhanced-persons concept that Nat had relayed from Barnes), his heart kept trying to persuade him that, so far as he was concerned, it needn't be. All right, so Nat and Steve's theory had been quite strikingly corroborated; there was no point denying that, with T'Chaka's angry words to Kravenoff still ringing in his ears. (He wondered idly how T'Chaka had acquired the knowledge that had so outraged him; had that new secret service of former Wakandan barge attendants picked up something? Or had Kravenoff himself made some sort of revelation to the King, in the course of telling him the new strategy for the full Assembly meeting?)

But did T'Chaka's anger, by itself, prove Latveria malign? After all, Wakanda – being honest – was an isolated, backward tribal monarchy; you couldn't expect its king to take a broad, mature view of modern international relations. Sure, conspiracy and hypocrisy weren't good things, but who was to say that an African warrior-chieftain's definition of them was the same as Rhodey's own? During his years in the Service, he'd seen his own country take measures for the greater good that Roland or Beowulf would have condemned outright as the craft of Lucifer – and a truly primitive mind would surely be even more emphatic on the point. But enlightened statecraft meant accepting necessary evils, didn't it?

As he thus struggled to assuage his conscience, the Assembly was called to session, and the oratorical battle for the powers of the Avengers began. As on Thursday, the Wakandan delegation had been granted the privilege of making the first address in favor of the Accords; as on Thursday, said delegation had named T'Chaka as their representative, in preference to any of the actual delegates. (Rhodey wasn't sure whether this was strictly kosher under U.N. procedural rules; nobody in the Secretariat seemed to have objected, but that might have just been their way of indulging their newest and wariest member state.) So the majesty of Wakanda took the podium, as he had on Thursday; unlike on Thursday, though, he managed to get more than five words out – and, in all probability, what he had to say this time would have shocked his Thursday self. Certainly, it shocked a fair number of his listeners' Saturday selves.

"Mr. President – Your Excellencies – ladies and gentlemen – peoples of the world," he said, doggedly loyal to his original introductory formula. "You all know why I am here; you know what was done to my subjects at an Avenger's hands. Eleven Wakandans lie in their graves because of Wanda Maximoff's actions in Lagos; it is my business as their king to seek justice for them – and that justice, Your Excellencies, has not yet been done."

He cast his gaze silently over the assembled delegates, as though seeking to prick the conscience of every nation on earth. (It worked well enough on Rhodey – not that he was a nation, of course.) Then he repeated solemnly, "I say that justice has not been done. And I do not say it alone; there is one here with us today – a man who could not be as he is if his heart were not honest and upright – who also says that justice was not done as it ought to have been done that day. Were I addressing my own people, I would bring him forward now to speak on his own behalf; unfortunately, the protocol of the United Nations will not permit this without a special motion…"

Right on cue, the delegate from the Congo rose to move that fifteen minutes' time be allocated to such speaker as the Wakandan delegation might designate. As nobody seemed interested in opposing the motion, the Assembly president ruled in favor without further debate, and T'Chaka nodded. "Thank you, Mr. President," he said, his twinkling eyes alone belying the gravity of his mien. "You are very kind to so indulge this old despot. I trust that you will not regret it."

He turned to his left, and beckoned. "Captain Rogers, will you please come forward?"

 _WHAT?_ Rhodey thought – and, to judge by the reaction in the hall, everyone else around him seemed to be thinking the same thing. It was amidst a hubbub of bewildered, alarmed, and – in several cases – angry voices that Steve Rogers, still in full Captain America regalia, strode across the stage and stepped up to take the place behind the podium that the Avengers' erstwhile adversary had vacated for him.

As he did so, he turned to that erstwhile adversary and waved his shield arm a little self-consciously, as if to say, _What should I do about this?_ In reply, T'Chaka looked toward the left side of the hall and snapped his fingers; the official Wakandan delegate rose from his seat and hurried forward, and T'Chaka gestured to him to take the shield from Steve. He did so, and Steve (looking uncomfortable and muttering something, probably thanks) turned to the still-protesting Assembly.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" he called over the din – and such was the classic hero's charisma that nearly all the delegates stopped murmuring to their neighbors and gave him their attention. "I'd like to thank His Majesty for giving me this opportunity – not so much for myself, but for all the Avengers. And one in particular, because I'm not the one who figured out what I'm about to tell you; if you're grateful for what you learn today, you should make out your thank-you notes to Miss Natalia Romanoff." Then he grinned wryly, and added, "If you're not, though, do me a favor and send your complaints to me. I'd hate to cause Nat any needless grief."

He took a deep breath. "So – about a month ago, I was in Nigeria with a few friends…"

* * *

For the next fifteen minutes exactly, the Captain laid before the world, point by point, what Rhodey had privately dubbed the Romanoff Thesis: that the existing law ought to have dealt with Wanda that day as it would have with any other private individual; that what it had done instead could not be explained by mere incompetence or cowardice, but argued deliberate corruption; that the only purpose such corruption could plausibly serve was to bolster the Sokovia Accords; that the use of such means argued not only a fundamental weakness in the Accords themselves (since honest men, the Captain sternly noted, did not need to strengthen their arguments with lies), but an active malevolence informing them that directly contradicted the humanitarian ideals they professed to further; and that, this being so, it was the duty of all right-thinking nations to oppose the Accords, in accord with a certain ancient principle about Greeks bearing gifts. (Meaning no disrespect to the Greek delegation, of course.)

All the while, T'Chaka stood to one side of him, in full view of the whole Assembly, nodding his approval; all the while, Kravenoff (whose nation and leader Steve conspicuously avoided mentioning) sat rigid in his seat near the middle of the chamber, his middling-pale face slowly turning a rich russet with rage. How the other dignitaries reacted, Rhodey didn't get around to noticing.

"So there you have it," Steve concluded. "For what it's worth, that's my and Agent Romanoff's two cents. And now it looks like my time's about up, so I'll give this podium back to His Majesty and let him add whatever he sees fit. Thank you all again."

He turned to the Wakandan ambassador, and held out his arm. There was a fractional pause – just long enough for the ambassador to glance inquiringly at T'Chaka, and for T'Chaka to nod ever so slightly; then the ambassador slipped the shield back onto Steve's arm, and Steve walked off the stage to an accompaniment of scattered, uncertain applause.

T'Chaka resumed the podium, and nodded his head in Steve's direction. "Thank _you_ , Captain Rogers," he said. "In fact, I have very little to add to the Captain's remarks. Only this: Some of you may feel that there is not enough substance to the Avengers' theory – that Captain Rogers has spun a plausible tale of conspiracy, but his failure to name the conspirators makes it little better than a vague and groundless smear." (Several delegates nodded.) "This is not the case. The chief conspirator can indeed be named; if the Captain has not done so, it is because he does not wish to accuse without proof. But the proof can be obtained – and I hereby pledge my honor and that of Wakanda that it will be obtained, and revealed to the world, within two weeks from today."

He glanced around, and added pointedly, "Of course, no-one who doubts Wakandan honor need believe that this is anything but an empty boast. But Wakanda will remember those who thus scorn her – and the day may come, Your Excellencies, when it will not be well to be one whose scorn Wakanda remembers."

Despite himself, Rhodey shivered. The words themselves weren't much more than the bombastic spear-rattling one would expect from any barbarian ruler, but there was something about T'Chaka's manner that made it impossible to dismiss his warning so easily. He spoke as one resting upon an immemorial heritage of unimagined power, and so confident in its efficacy that it was a matter of no consequence whether or not the rest of the world believed. Which, of course, made his promise all the more believable.

While Rhodey was pondering whether he himself believed it, Steve arrived at the observer station; picking up Rhodey's cap, he tossed it back to its owner and dropped his shield into the seat it had been warming. "So how did I do, Colonel?" he inquired jauntily.

Rhodey caught the cap in his right hand, and jabbed it toward Steve in place of that hand's index finger. "You, Captain Rogers, have got some explaining to do," he said.

Steve chuckled. "Yeah, I guess so," he agreed. "And I'll do that explaining as soon as Kravenoff or one of his allies calls for a recess; that shouldn't be long in coming, if I'm any guesser."

Indeed, even as he spoke, T'Chaka concluded his remarks and left the podium, and the delegate from Myanmar rose to move a thirty-minute recess, noting reasonably that the original schedule of pro- and anti-Accords speakers was no longer applicable now that Wakanda had crossed the aisle. Again, nobody cared to argue the point; the recess was called, and Steve jerked his head meaningfully toward the nearest door as the delegates began to rise from their seats and descend upon the Assembly president. "Quiet place to talk?" he said.

"Let's go," said Rhodey.


	11. The Webs We Weave (WtMS Pt II)

"So," said Rhodey, when the two of them had found a secure spot in the outside corridor, "how long have you and King T'Chaka been bosom buddies, Cap?"

Steve glanced up at a dial clock on the wall above. "About half an hour, I'd say," he said. "It's the weirdest thing, really. I was just standing in the hallway, talking to the delegate from São Tomé and Príncipe about that enhanced-persons concern of Bucky's – not using his name, of course, just saying that I'd heard from someone else who was treated with Erskine's serum. And T'Chaka was in the background, talking in Wakandan to someone on a fancy earpiece; I didn't think he was paying attention to us, but I guess he must have been, because he came up to me as His Excellency was walking away and started asking me a whole bunch of questions about Erskine."

"About Erskine?" Rhodey repeated, furrowing his brow in puzzlement. "Why?"

Steve shrugged. "No idea. Maybe one of those old German ambassadors on the barges was related to him; I started to suspect that after a while, from things T'Chaka was asking. Anyway, I answered him as well as I could – he seemed particularly interested in what Erskine said about Schmidt, and how the serum hadn't worked properly on him because of his pride and bloodlust – and then, eventually, he fell silent, stood thinking for a moment, and then out of nowhere asked me what my own views were on the Accords."

"Uh-huh," said Rhodey. "So you told him…"

"Just what Natasha's theory was," said Steve, "and what my reasons were for agreeing with her. And T'Chaka asked if I would be willing to share this with the Assembly – I swear, apart from the accent, he sounded exactly like my old third-grade teacher talking about someone's chewing gum – and I said I'd be glad to, and the rest you know."

He shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe the whole thing with Kravenoff had just left him ready to believe something was up – but that doesn't explain why he started with the whole Erskine thing. I can't believe he was just making conversation, can you?"

Rhodey shook his head, remembering how T'Chaka had introduced Steve not long before. _One who could not be as he is if his heart were not honest and upright_ … did T'Chaka know something about Super-Soldier Serum that the rest of the world didn't? He had a wild momentary vision of a prototype bottle sitting somewhere in a Wakandan treasure-chamber, half-empty from all the doses that great warriors had taken from it…

He shook his head firmly. Get _a grip, Rhodes,_ he told himself. _This is Wakanda you're talking about, not Narnia._

"Well, I hope the two of you are happy with the mess you've created, anyway," he said aloud. "I mean, let's say we're right, and there really is a sinister conspiracy at the back of the Accords. How do you think those guys are going to feel about Wakanda jumping ship like that?"

"Oh, there's definitely going to be trouble," said Steve. "We've known that since we first heard T'Chaka and Kravenoff going at it. For Doom, losing Wakanda means his whole Plan A goes down in flames; he'll be lucky to get half the Assembly now, let alone the two-thirds he needs. The question is, what's Plan B going to be like? Because I've got to assume he has one."

"You sure?" said Rhodey, mentally substituting _X_ for _Doom_ to keep the question from grating on him too badly. "Maybe he'll just shrug it off and go on to something else. If he was just taking advantage of an opportunity that presented itself…"

"He wasn't, though," said Steve. "Remember, we're saying he set up the whole thing in Lagos ahead of time: giving Rumlow his plan, bribing the police to stay out of it, all that. Nobody sticks his neck out that way unless he's really committed to getting his payoff."

Rhodey made a face. "Okay, fair point," he said. "So we're assuming a guy who'll stop at nothing to replace the U.N. with a new world empire of his own, but has to look like a good guy while he's doing it." He thought for a moment. "I guess what he does, then, is find a new way to strike at the U.N.'s weak spot – get everyone all outraged about the five-country veto, not because it's keeping a bunch of loose-cannon superheroes from being reined in, but for some other reason that might not even have anything to do with the Avengers. It probably won't happen right away, but it's something we'll want to keep our eyes peeled for over the next year or so."

Steve nodded. "Makes sense," he said. "And the Accords themselves? You think he just walks away and lets them crash and burn?"

"Has to, doesn't he?" said Rhodey. "Like you said, there's no way they get two-thirds of the Assembly now – and even if they did, a French veto couldn't be the kind of shock he was counting on, in this new climate. In fact, he probably _wants_ them to fail now," he added thoughtfully. "If they go to the Security Council and get vetoed, he can say goodbye to any chance of people being shocked and outraged by that rule later on."

"Mm," said Steve. "So, as far as this meeting goes, there's nothing left for us to do."

"Pretty much," said Rhodey. "Just sit back and enjoy the ride, Captain America." And he gave Steve a brotherly slap on the arm, which Steve smiled at and returned. (Gently, of course, so as not to splinter his colleague's humerus.)

* * *

So, in due time, the two of them made their way back into the Assembly chamber, where the delegate from Turkey was already busily engaged in damage control. He evidently hadn't been talking very long, since the first words of his that Rhodey caught, as he and Steve sat down, were, "…very well to cast aspersions, if one is afraid to argue the case on its merits. But is Captain Rogers prepared to say what the malevolent intentions actually are that lie hidden in the Accords? It would seem not, or he would have done so when he was at this podium. To be sure," he added, as murmurs of dissent began to swell from the Assembly, "I do not discount the Wakandan sovereign's assurance of forthcoming corroboration; I only say that 'You must vote this way now, and later we will give you the reason why' is a very easy argument to make." (Which sounded to Rhodey as though he _was_ discounting T'Chaka's assurance – but maybe there was some fine distinction there that only a trained diplomat could perceive.)

"For her part, Turkey remains unconvinced. The Avengers may say, if they like, that they can be arrested and tried like any other civilian, and therefore the Accords are unnecessary; we say that this is folly. Where is the policeman who would dare arrest the Hulk? These are not mere men and women, and to treat them so is absurd. It would be irresponsible on the part of the world not to have procedures in place…"

At this juncture, Steve, who had been staring abstractedly off into space since he took his seat, suddenly leaned down and jotted something on the notepad the U.N. had provided him; then he tore off the top sheet and passed it to Rhodey, who, glancing down at it, found that it read, _What abt. D's rival int. org.? Avs.' next job t.c.o.?_

It took Rhodey a few seconds to decode this; once he had, though, he conceded there was some sense to it. Yes, Doom – X – probably did have a rival international organization set up, at least in embryo, to step in and claim the U.N.'s mantle once the latter had been delegitimized; yes, taking care of it should probably be the next item on the Avengers' agenda. So he took up his own pencil, and wrote underneath Steve's scrawl, _Sure. How?_

He passed this back to Steve, who glanced at it and almost immediately started writing another line underneath Rhodey's. When he had finished this and passed it back, Rhodey found that it read, _Try EU? Eur. D's turf acc. Nat ("layic V"). Cd. mean use as core?_

Rhodey's first response, upon deciphering this, was to think how exquisitely typical it was that Steve Rogers shouldn't know how to spell "laic". His second was to feel a twinge of alarm. Of course, on the supposition that Doom was X, it was quite reasonable to suppose that he meant to pervert the European Union into a nucleus for his designs of world conquest; there was no reason, in the abstract, why the same process that had made Brussels into the de-facto capital of a pan-European state couldn't be extended across the whole globe. (Not that plenty of former colonial countries wouldn't resist, in the ordinary course of things – which would explain the point of this whole back-door, lesser-evil, Wakanda-as-patsy approach…) But, apart from Rhodey's own firm conviction that Doom _wasn't_ X (yes, it _was_ still firm, dammit), there was the basic objection that he wrote out as line 4: _No go. Avs. vs. EU = war._

Steve seemed to see the force of this; anyway, he spent more time choosing his abbreviated words this time around – enough, at least, for Rhodey's attention to drift back to the podium. There seemed to have been a change of speakers while the two of them had been corresponding; the delegate from Mauritania was now up, and was responding with some heat to the Turkish delegate's not-mere-men-and-women remark. What, he demanded, did the gentleman from Turkey mean to insinuate that the Avengers were, that the laws should treat them so differently from men and women? Were they gods, perhaps? (Said with all the scornful irony with which one Muslim might be expected to suggest this position in another.) Were they jinni, or angels? (Not much less arch.) Because, really, Mauritania was unaware of anything else that those who were not men could be – except for beasts, of course. And surely it was not Turkey's position that Captain America and his group of world-rescuing warriors were mere brute beasts to be restrained by force. So the only conclusion left…

The sheet found itself atop Rhodey's desk again. _Not vs.,_ Steve had written. _Strat. 3-fold: 1, assess D's supp. Bruss. – 2, build up opp. force within EU – 3, use latt. cont. form. Not cert., but best-case scen. shd. be goal._

Now that was the kind of talk Rhodey liked to hear (or, in this case, read). If there was anything that made him feel ambivalent about being an Avenger, it was the way their missions always seemed to degenerate into grandiose slug-fests; sure, it was a rush at the time, but it always left a bad taste in his mouth afterwards. If Cap's goal was to preemptively avoid that – to neutralize Doo… X by means of quiet persuasion and the creation of alternate climates of opinion, rather than by throwing energy blasts around – then Rhodey was on board all the way, no questions asked. Or, rather, no questions except one, which he scrawled almost eagerly on the sheet: _Details? Who does what?_

And this question, for the next ten minutes or so, exercised the two men to the near-total exclusion of all else. They barely noticed the Accords debate as it proceeded steadily in front of them – which was rather a pity, as there were parts of it that were quite thought-provoking. When the Mauritanian delegate had finished saying his piece, his place was taken by the delegate from Thailand, who remarked thoughtfully that the previous addresses both seemed to him – if their authors would forgive him – to have been somewhat off the real point. Granted that the Avengers were men and women, or the equivalents thereof before the law, still the question remained whether the powers they wielded were truly compatible with traditional ideas of law enforcement, or whether some more novel measure wasn't necessary to ensure that a rogue Hulk or Vision didn't someday succeed in vaporizing a whole city's police department and laughing at the impotence of the law to call him to account. This, to his mind, was the real purpose behind the Sokovia Accords, and the reason why his country still supported them despite Wakanda and Captain America's concerns. –And, after this, the delegate from Switzerland got up, and said with equally cultivated judiciousness that he sympathized with the previous speaker's concerns, but regarded the Sokovia Accords as an overly simplistic solution to the problem thus identified. It was not the Avengers, as such, that threatened traditional law enforcement with obsolescence; it was a number of recent social and technological developments, not directly related in themselves, that did so, some of which (not all) were represented by some (not all) of the Avengers' members. The recent interest of Asgard in Earth, with all that had resulted therefrom; the developments made by Tony Stark and Stark Industries in weapons technology over the past decade; certain breakthroughs in performance enhancement that stemmed, ultimately, from Abraham Erskine's work decades before – and also, the Swiss delegate begged to remind his colleagues, such wholly random phenomena as the Convergence of the Realms: these, if anything, were what had made it impossible for Earth's governments to continue as they had done hitherto. Each required a distinct, specific, and carefully considered response, both from the United Nations and from each member state; focusing on the Avengers, or on so-called "enhanced persons" generally, could be nothing but an evasion of the true responsibility. It all made for a stimulating discourse on issues at once topical and perpetually relevant, such as the parliamentary assemblies of Earth witness far less often than they ought.

But Steve and Rhodey missed it all – nor, it must be said, was the object of their own discourse much less significant. In those ten minutes or so, something very like a re-conception of the Avengers was drawn up between the two of them; the loosely defined band of Earth's mightiest heroes was converted, at least on paper, into a precisely tooled weapon for preventing the EU's conversion into a tool of world conquest. Nat, with her geopolitical expertise, would naturally take the strategic lead, possibly aided by Fury and Clint if they were available; Tony's associates within the NATO chain of command, along with Rhodey's less exalted connections, could provide useful starting points for an in-depth investigation; Wanda, as an EU citizen, was free to move about the Continent openly and without hassle, which would likely prove invaluable down the line. The Vision's role was more of a question mark; his powers of infiltration had the potential to come in very handy, but only if his conspicuousness as a one-of-a-kind entity could somehow be glossed over. That part would likely have to be played by ear – assuming, that was, that the Vision would be on board with the project at all, or even still regarded himself as an Avenger. (Given his recent unexplained will-o'-the-wisp act, neither Steve nor Rhodey felt wholly confident in assuming this – though what could have happened to alienate him from the team was likewise a mystery.) Anyway, with or without him, the role of each major team member in the overall effort seemed pretty clear.

Each, that was, save one. _And you?_ Rhodey wrote. _What do you do?_

He passed it to Steve, who sighed and scrawled a lengthy reply. _We'll see,_ it proved to read. _This new Eur. not rly. my turf – I'd prob. mostly just be i.t.w. Maybe Sam & I can prvd. dstrc. some point._

It surprised Rhodey how much it depressed him to read this. Not just because Steve was underselling himself (though he did think he was; however postmodern and sophisticated Europe got, he didn't believe that the hero of the Howling Advance would ever cease to have clout there), but because he suddenly had a picture of a world where Captain America really was just in the way, and good only for providing distractions alongside a wing-suited ex-paratrooper. It wasn't a world, he thought, in which he much wanted to live.

To distract his mind from such thoughts, he slid the paper to one side and readdressed himself to the Accords debate. The Swiss delegate had descended the podium, and the final speaker on the pro-Accords side was now mounting thereto – and this, Rhodey was in no way surprised to find, was Kravenoff of Latveria. With a cat-like grace surprising in so large a man, he leapt up the steps and strode across the stage, self-assured as a lion; reaching the podium, he grasped it fiercely in both hands, and fixed the General Assembly of the United Nations with a gaze that Rhodey could see glittering even from the observers' row.

"Peoples of the world," he said, his normally rasping voice curiously soft and silky, "if it pleases you, I would like to recur to a remark that my colleague from Mauritania made, when he stood here not long ago. He suggested, as I recall, that we who support the Sokovia Accords regard the Avengers not as men to be appealed to, but as wild beasts to be restrained; deeming this unreasonable, he concluded that the Accords themselves are unreasonable as well.

"Now, my colleague from Thailand has, to my mind, quite fully summarized the case against this conclusion, and I will not attempt to go again over ground that has been so excellently covered already. But I would ask my fellow delegates to consider: is the premise attributed to our side really so unsound? Do none of us, when we contemplate these fierce and powerful figures sweeping down upon our cities to war and destroy, have the sense of beholding mighty birds and beasts of prey, to whom our laws and borders mean no more than gates to a rhinoceros or walls to an eagle? Do none of us secretly wish for some bold and mighty man to dispose of them, as villagers in old India might wish for a tiger-slayer? I think many of us do, and those not the least wise.

"For man himself is a beast by nature – the fiercest, most treacherous beast of all. Laws may tame him for a time, but only as a wolf is cowed by the report of a rifle – that is, by the brute reverence for that which is stronger than he. Clothe him with superhuman power, remove the impetus to fear the judges and armies of civilization, and the beast within him will awaken once again, all the more savage for its long captivity. Then woe to those who have sought to restrain him, for he will surely avenge himself upon them; he will rend their cities with his bare hands, and howl in triumph amid the ruins…"

He continued in this vein for some time, and Rhodey, stock-still and slack-jawed, listened to it with a kind of horrified fascination. What was the man doing? Surely, he didn't expect to persuade anyone to vote for the Accords by painting Captain America as some kind of latent Conan the Barbarian, did he? If anything, this sort of thing would encourage others to vote _against_ the Accords…

…which, as Rhodey had himself noted, was just what X would want at this stage…

…what, indeed, X's U.N. representative, if he had one, would likely have been ordered during that recess to guarantee…

A peculiar kind of cold horror, which only those can know who have personally watched their idols fall, squeezed at Rhodey's heart. _Oh, God,_ he thought. _It's true. Nat, Steve, Wanda… they were right all along. Victor Von Doom is an evil mastermind bent on world domination._

No sooner had he made this mental admission than he felt a hot shame at not having made it sooner. Really, he had known the moment he had seen Kravenoff emerge from the window recess; his dismissals of Wakandan backwardness had, he now plainly saw, been nothing but a flimsy wall thrown up between himself and a truth he hadn't wished to face. But there was no avoiding it now; there was only one explanation for Kravenoff's current behavior, and that one meant that the man Rhodey had revered for decades as the embodiment of the liberal ideal was actually a scheming megalomaniac whose tools were deceit and treachery.

As he reeled beneath this blow, Kravenoff's peroration continued, growing more feverishly eloquent with every clause. Whether he had believed in its thesis himself to begin with, or whether it had merely been the first way he thought of to undermine the Accords by arguing in favor of them, Rhodey didn't know, but it was plain that he was coming to believe it more and more deeply the longer he spoke. (Which was in character with what Rhodey knew of Kravenoff; he had often heard that the man was a notorious self-dramatizer – hence his famous nickname – and a sucker for stark, romantic visions with a flavor of Spenglerian pessimism about them.) It was lucky that the U.N. set a limit on the length of speeches; if he remained in this attitude too much longer, Rhodey wouldn't put it past him to snap and start planning a superhero big-game hunt of his own.

"Shall the world permit such creatures to roam unfettered?" Kravenoff demanded, the podium quivering slightly as he struck it with his fist. "Shall our women and children live out their days in dread of their bestial fury? No, I say! Let this Assembly adopt the resolution before it, and then we shall see how much their vaunted might avails against the determination of true men to…"

 _Thwiiipppp!_

Without warning, a thin jet of white streaked through the air toward the podium, and suddenly Kravenoff's entire lower jaw was wrapped in some pasty substance, sealing his mouth shut. As he struggled, a new voice was heard – a boyish, feisty tenor with a pronounced Queens accent. "Okay, pal," it said. "Thanks for playing and all, but I think you've made your point."

Everyone looked wildly left and right to see the speaker; Steve was one of the few who thought to look up. He nudged Rhodey and pointed, and the latter raised his eyes to see a slender figure in a red knit bodysuit dangling from the ceiling, suspended from what looked bizarrely like a giant cobweb.

"Now," said this prodigy, lowering himself slowly toward the Assembly as he spoke, "how about letting your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man say a few words, huh?"


End file.
